Phone Call From A Stranger (1952)

Heavy Weather In Flight:
Lives After Deaths

Phone Call From A Stranger (1952)
Studio: 20th Century Fox • 96 min B&W • AR 1.33:1 • US: 1 Feb 1952
Re-release: Fox (Apr 2008)
Starring: Shelley Winters, Gary Merrill, Michael Rennie, Keenan Wynn, Bette Davis
Dir: Jean Negulesco

In a town full of starlets, Bette Davis was always an actress with leading star qualities – even very early in her career. Her most memorable work spans a very few years, just before and just after the beginning of WWII. Had it not been for a sensational return in 1950’s All About Eve – playing an actress past her prime (!) – Davis might have been offered the small role of Marie Hoke in Phone Call From A Stranger as an afterthought by the producers. Instead, Davis lobbied for the role, believing then, and in later years, that it was a juicy plum with opportunities for depth and range not often presented. It’s tempting to report she was right: but, nearly 60 years later, perhaps the jury’s still out.

In the midst of a horrendous rain storm, lawyer David Trask (Gary Merrill) hurries into a cab and heads to the airport. He’s leaving behind a wife and two daughters, unable to face living with knowledge of her indiscretions with another man, nor find a way to forgive her. While waiting for the late night flight at Midland, Iowa airport, he meets fellow travellers: Binky Gay (Shelley Winters), an aspiring actress who slipped away to New York only to find work as a stripper, after a few weeks of glory on stage; Dr Robert Fortness (Michael Rennie), a stiff-lipped, free drinking physician with a secret to reveal to the Los Angeles DA; and Eddie Hoke (Keenan Wynn), an annoying, crass, loud, in-your-face novelty joke salesman, or at least a salesman with an unending supplying of fake eyeballs, ears and knee-slapper guffaws.

“It was a dark and stormy night” doesn’t begin to convey the hell of this flight, undertaken in the midst of a terrible rain. After four hours, the flight touches down in Vega, TX (better known as the original termination of Route 66) on the border with New Mexico. Crew and passengers retire to the bus-stop like clapboard terminal restaurant (quick! name another movie with a screen door and porch at the airport); our clique sticks together and decide to exchange addresses. They make a pact that once a year they’ll meet again to regale each other of the adventure they were having. By morning, the skies are clear and the plane takes-off for its final destination – but fate intervenes and the plane crashes; most perish, and only David Trask among our clique survives (and literally, with just a scratch — but this is the movies!).

Settling into a hotel room in LA, David discovers the slips of paper with the phone numbers of his fellow travellers. One by one he calls the surviving families to share memories of their final hours together. In turn he meets Binky’s husband and mother-in-law, a hard-nosed night club owner and ex-vaudevillian; Claire Fortness and her son Jerry who has just run away from home; and finally Marie Hoke (Bette Davis), who is not quite the glamorous swimmer we believe her to be, but an older invalid, bed-ridden after a terrible accident. What David discovers in each encounter is a little bit of his own life story, helping him gain a new perspective on his own family and marital issues.

Bosley Crowther in the New York Times wrote at the opening: “So slick, indeed, is the whole thing — so smooth and efficiently contrived to fit and run with the precision of a beautifully made machine — that it very soon gives the impression of being wholly mechanical, picked up from a story-teller’s blueprints rather than from the scroll of life.” There is no escaping the too lengthy set-up, and no denying the film drags here and there; and without the redeeming distractions of a memorable score, or fabulous sets and locations, or glamourous gowns, there is more than a whiff of the mechanical. Still, IAR Wylie’s scenario intrigues, and like an episode of Columbo, it’s the working out that’s most of the fun. Thankfully, Nunnally Johnson (writer of The Grapes of Wrath, The Woman At The Window, Black Widow, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit) is at the helm as writer and producer and Jean Negulesco (Humoresque, Johnny Belinda, Titanic) directs skillfully and with moments of flair, if unfortunately little inspiration.

This is a Gary Merrill vehicle and he carries the film efficiently. Yet the character’s a man facing a future as a black hole, his family life in ruins, and he’s made the decision, as a lawyer, to run away and start over, while still hoping to provide for his children from afar. He has no apparent plan; he’s running on gut fuel. Except for the final scene – played opposite Bette Davis (his real life wife from 1950 to 1960), Merrill is far too “matter-of-fact”, and certainly too grounded, to raise the emotional stakes for the audience. It has to be said the same applies to Michael Rennie whose character is on the brink of ruin, and who engages Trask during the Vega lay-over to represent him as he intends to turn himself in when they arrive at their final destination. These are powerful demons too tightly controlled, too sub-merged here to be compelling.

For Shelley Winters, this film was released just six months after A Place In The Sun which earned her her first Oscar nomination; and she is meltingly charming as an almost unhinged first time flyer, revealing her vulnerabilities at realising life with her husband was more important than a questionable career on stage. But it is the Bette Davis scene where, Perry Mason-like, her invalid character interrogates David Trask on why he is really calling on each of the families; she understands redemption, true love, and true love’s loss. Her clipped dialogue, and shifting emotions as she leaks out her own grief, fighting the reality of being left suddenly alone, is the stuff that only star actors can create. It is the most memorable part of the film, the only part which stays with the viewer (though several other moments might have stayed had they been less mechanical).

There are no extra commentaries or featurettes; but there is a trailer and a “teaser”. As part of Fox’s “Cinema Classics Collection” the DVD is available singly or in a Bette Davis 100th Birthday Celebration box, along with All About Eve, Hush, Hush … Sweet Charlotte and two other films. A very good job of restoration has been made, specific to this release. As an ensemble piece, Phone Call From A Stranger has merits though it has to be said the players do not rise to the potential of the material. This is a setting of unrevealed diamonds in the rough, as it were.