Dial 1119 (1950) is cheap as chips, indecisively conservative, and the earliest film I've seen treat the interrelation of violence and the media through the lens of television rather than newspapers or radio—one of these weird little bulletins from the national id that fetch up in film noir, half snapshot, half fantasy, like the flatscreen TV installed over the bar of the local dive on which the patrons held hostage by a gunman with a grievance can watch their own jeopardy televised for the entertainment of their fellow citizens a science-fictional half-century before LED-LCD. It looks so natural now that everyone carries the latest live feed in their pockets. Marshall McLuhan, eat your heart out.
Perhaps to mitigate the obvious nepotism—it was the first feature assignment of Gerald Mayer, who had previously directed screen tests for his uncle's studio as well as one critically dismissed short—Dial 1119 is budgeted like Louis B. Mayer coughed apologetically and the minimal sets of its night metropolis lend the proceedings an air of Blitzstein manqué, especially when combined with the significant nomenclature. A less subtle appellation for the dead end of a murder spree is difficult to imagine than "Terminal City." The local radio station and its TV affiliate go by the equally restrained call sign of "WKYL" and the all-night neon that beckons a killer across the street from the brownstone stoop of a psychiatrist's home address couldn't advertise its ignorance of the violence about to descend on its slow-drinking clientele more ironically than the "Oasis Bar." The politics, however, come strictly from Breen when the psychiatrist exists specifically to lose a bleeding-heart argument about capital punishment to the tough-minded police captain who wanted an incurable psycho burnt three years ago instead of preserved at state expense to kill again as soon as he got loose. Sam Levene puts as much matter-of-fact humanism as he can into Dr. Faron as Richard Rober does cynical resourcefulness into Captain Keiver, but even when the dialogue stresses the difference of professional opinion rather than personal animosity between the two men, it's still a straw man and the film's weakest angle: "How far does a man have to go to prove that he's right?" The screenplay by John Monks Jr. has much more success observing rather than arguing the mediated landscape in which all the characters participate even before some of them end up breaking news on Channel 11. The radio program with which it opens does not just set the scene of 7:30 pm CST in "the fastest-growing commercial center of the Middle Valley," it cross-links characters who have as yet no idea that they'll share anything that night beyond a taste for music from the Crystal Room. Perhaps inevitably as Hollywood side-eyed its small-screen suburban challenger, the script takes a couple of cheap jabs at the new medium of television when the bartender grouses about his fancy set which goes regularly on the fritz and shows the same surf of mouth-breathing channels when it doesn't: "Fourteen hundred bucks installed the guy charges me. Push-button picture control, reflected image, three-by-four-foot screen. What do I get on it? Wrestlers. Crumbs." But when the remote truck from WKYL-TV can pull up into the already gathering crowd of a media circus with newsboys crying the extra edition and the jingle of an enterprising ice cream vendor catering to the looky-loos milling behind the police cordon, the prescient ouroboros by which the hostages find themselves included among the "spectators to this exciting spot news television broadcast . . . of the police siege of Gunther Wyckoff, the mad gunman" feels no more intrinsically monstrous than the dime-slamming scramble of the press pack to beat one another to the telephones in the finest traditions of The Front Page (1928), merely more ironically immediate. In real-time transmission, as clearly as the bystanders in the street and the TV crew switching cameras and lenses to follow their anchor's breathless lead, everyone in the Oasis can watch Dr. Faron quietly slip the cordon and walk to meet the deadline by which Wyckoff threatened to execute the hostages if the psychiatrist wasn't sent to talk to him face to face. An extra layer of mise-en-abyme out from all those monitors, we watch him in real time, too. Much as it would have infuriated MGM, Dial 1119 may be ideally experienced via TV.
The film's other strength is the characterization inside the hostage situation, nicely varied from central casting norms. Late in the action, as Wyckoff psychs himself up to commit cold-blooded mass murder—he has by this point killed four people and wounded a fifth, but a clay-pigeon row of executions evidently requires a stronger excuse than self-defense—he accuses the hostages, "You're all the same, every one of you. You have nothing to live for." It would be suitably existential of the screenplay if he were right, but it's smarter that he's not: the patrons of the Oasis are a legitimately motley sample of urban small fry as opposed to socially conscious symbols. Keefe Brasselle's Skip might come closest as an expectant father jumping for news from the hospital every time the phone rings, but everyone else is just getting on with their night when a gun-toting fantasist crashes into it. Andrea King's Helen and Leon Ames' Earl are negotiating the time until their train, a self-conscious secretary who's just about managed to let herself be talked into a dirty weekend and a would-be wolf who'd feel much more secure of his conquest if she'd only finish her drink. James Bell as the veteran milquetoast of Harry Barnes is blowing off his annual steam, snappily ordering himself a boilermaker like a properly hard-bitten newshawk and on account of his ulcers can't get served anything butcher than a sherry flip; he wanders off to the restroom more casually than any character I have seen since a pre-Code and incarnates a dilemma as old as the fourth estate when he concludes his spellbinding invocation of a stopped press with the rueful comedown, "I picked a great night to quit the business. I'm an eyewitness to a Pulitzer Prize story and can't even get to a telephone." The glamorously combative Freddy, played by Virginia Field with a dangerously mercurial intelligence under her telegram stop of a laugh, is doing her best to put away martinis like Prohibition's coming back into style, but William Conrad's Chuckles looks out for her as dourly and conscientiously as he does all of the customers he disparages to their faces as "crumbs." Character actors all, we can't tell from their billing whether they'll survive or be disposed of, break or show spirit when the chips are down, but the film almost never loses sight of them as people rather than ciphers of irony or mortality. When the first shot is fired in the Oasis Bar, it doesn't just suck the air out of the room—Skip looks suddenly far too young for fatherhood, Harry shocked old. Not until after Wyckoff has motioned to bolt and chain the door does one of the women scream, as if the reality of the horror has taken that long to hit home. We are conditioned even by film noir to expect philosophy when people are brought up short against the prospect of their deaths. Dial 1119 gives us a lot more of being sarcastic and scared: "And you better leave God out of it, too. God's got other fish to fry besides you."
Wyckoff himself complicates the picture, even when I am not entirely confident that the picture understands to what extent. Played by the clean-cut, collegiate Marshall Thompson, he makes a strikingly modern, pop-culturally recognizable killer, his calmly detached affect something very different from the standard tells of Hollywood craziness even when he's classily introduced by a special police bulletin as "a recent fugitive from the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane." He's polite, undeterrable, not inhuman; as he paces the bar, haranguing the hostages with disjointed fragments of a nightmarish beach landing, a battlefield promotion refused, the broken promises of peacetime, until he seems to confuse the police sniper he just shot through the ducts of the air conditioning with the enemy he faced behind the dunes, he embodies with unusual bluntness the post-war fear of the disturbed veteran. "I'm a good man with a gun," he boasts bitterly, a mid-century forgotten man. "Who gave it to me? Who told me to use it?" The reality that nobody did—that Wyckoff was drafted and bounced out 4-F and never served in WWII at all—may be even more compelling, however, a cop-out in the sense that it dodges the specter of the home-front killer that will reappear more insistently over the coming decade, but dead-on in the questions it uncorks about American violence, how it is legitimized, who gets to use it. "You made yourself believe you were a soldier because you knew that soldiers were the only people permitted to kill without committing a crime." It's nastier than a mere case of stolen valor. Wyckoff's appropriation of war trauma has given him not just what he disingenuously construes as a doctor's note for homicide, but a heroized smokescreen for the insecurities that led him to hoard all the guns and military histories from which he confabulated his service in an accidentally timeless touch of psychopathology. It goes by almost too fast to catch in the babble of reporters, but the murder he committed because he couldn't face the truth of his civilian war was of a woman. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to wonder if he "like[s] a gun in [his] hand" because it assuages the same fragile masculinity that plagues so much of our open-carry landscape. None of this nuance survives the wave function collapse of the ending which vindicates the expediency of state violence without seeming to notice the attention it calls to the right of the police to kill with the soldier's impunity, but it does make it at least a little clever that the person who finally draws a bead on Wyckoff isn't a man. He looks more than betrayed, he looks petulantly cheated by her apologetically helpless shrug, as if she didn't know what he was expecting. Even he seems to realize that "You had no right to shoot me" isn't exactly a gunman's dream epitaph.
Of all things, this confused little artifact looks fantastic, thanks to the gratuitously inventive cinematography of Paul Vogel which match-cuts the chug of a blender with the whir of a fan, cues the authority of an argument by filming it in shadowy reflection, and lines up the hostages on their bar stools between the glitter of glasses like targets in a shooting gallery; keeping time with the shortening news cycle, it gives the last word to the indifference of normality reasserting itself, the crowd breaking up as the TV crew coils up their cables and the survivors resume the routines of their lives. I like the casual inclusion of the eyewitness played by Argentina Brunetti whose monoglot Italian has to be translated by a police interpreter. I have perhaps even less sympathy than intended for a self-image shored by combat fantasies since my grandfather was 4-F in World War II and didn't get weird about it. As if the flatscreen TV weren't anachronism enough, the title comes from the central emergency number urged by the news flash that fatefully broadcasts Wyckoff's mug shot into the Oasis: "If you see this man, call the police—dial 1119!" It came from TCM's Noir Alley, but can be found hanging around the Internet Archive, where if you tap out on the psychiatry there's always the eight-and-a-half-inch lens. This right brought to you by my exciting backers at Patreon.
Perhaps to mitigate the obvious nepotism—it was the first feature assignment of Gerald Mayer, who had previously directed screen tests for his uncle's studio as well as one critically dismissed short—Dial 1119 is budgeted like Louis B. Mayer coughed apologetically and the minimal sets of its night metropolis lend the proceedings an air of Blitzstein manqué, especially when combined with the significant nomenclature. A less subtle appellation for the dead end of a murder spree is difficult to imagine than "Terminal City." The local radio station and its TV affiliate go by the equally restrained call sign of "WKYL" and the all-night neon that beckons a killer across the street from the brownstone stoop of a psychiatrist's home address couldn't advertise its ignorance of the violence about to descend on its slow-drinking clientele more ironically than the "Oasis Bar." The politics, however, come strictly from Breen when the psychiatrist exists specifically to lose a bleeding-heart argument about capital punishment to the tough-minded police captain who wanted an incurable psycho burnt three years ago instead of preserved at state expense to kill again as soon as he got loose. Sam Levene puts as much matter-of-fact humanism as he can into Dr. Faron as Richard Rober does cynical resourcefulness into Captain Keiver, but even when the dialogue stresses the difference of professional opinion rather than personal animosity between the two men, it's still a straw man and the film's weakest angle: "How far does a man have to go to prove that he's right?" The screenplay by John Monks Jr. has much more success observing rather than arguing the mediated landscape in which all the characters participate even before some of them end up breaking news on Channel 11. The radio program with which it opens does not just set the scene of 7:30 pm CST in "the fastest-growing commercial center of the Middle Valley," it cross-links characters who have as yet no idea that they'll share anything that night beyond a taste for music from the Crystal Room. Perhaps inevitably as Hollywood side-eyed its small-screen suburban challenger, the script takes a couple of cheap jabs at the new medium of television when the bartender grouses about his fancy set which goes regularly on the fritz and shows the same surf of mouth-breathing channels when it doesn't: "Fourteen hundred bucks installed the guy charges me. Push-button picture control, reflected image, three-by-four-foot screen. What do I get on it? Wrestlers. Crumbs." But when the remote truck from WKYL-TV can pull up into the already gathering crowd of a media circus with newsboys crying the extra edition and the jingle of an enterprising ice cream vendor catering to the looky-loos milling behind the police cordon, the prescient ouroboros by which the hostages find themselves included among the "spectators to this exciting spot news television broadcast . . . of the police siege of Gunther Wyckoff, the mad gunman" feels no more intrinsically monstrous than the dime-slamming scramble of the press pack to beat one another to the telephones in the finest traditions of The Front Page (1928), merely more ironically immediate. In real-time transmission, as clearly as the bystanders in the street and the TV crew switching cameras and lenses to follow their anchor's breathless lead, everyone in the Oasis can watch Dr. Faron quietly slip the cordon and walk to meet the deadline by which Wyckoff threatened to execute the hostages if the psychiatrist wasn't sent to talk to him face to face. An extra layer of mise-en-abyme out from all those monitors, we watch him in real time, too. Much as it would have infuriated MGM, Dial 1119 may be ideally experienced via TV.
The film's other strength is the characterization inside the hostage situation, nicely varied from central casting norms. Late in the action, as Wyckoff psychs himself up to commit cold-blooded mass murder—he has by this point killed four people and wounded a fifth, but a clay-pigeon row of executions evidently requires a stronger excuse than self-defense—he accuses the hostages, "You're all the same, every one of you. You have nothing to live for." It would be suitably existential of the screenplay if he were right, but it's smarter that he's not: the patrons of the Oasis are a legitimately motley sample of urban small fry as opposed to socially conscious symbols. Keefe Brasselle's Skip might come closest as an expectant father jumping for news from the hospital every time the phone rings, but everyone else is just getting on with their night when a gun-toting fantasist crashes into it. Andrea King's Helen and Leon Ames' Earl are negotiating the time until their train, a self-conscious secretary who's just about managed to let herself be talked into a dirty weekend and a would-be wolf who'd feel much more secure of his conquest if she'd only finish her drink. James Bell as the veteran milquetoast of Harry Barnes is blowing off his annual steam, snappily ordering himself a boilermaker like a properly hard-bitten newshawk and on account of his ulcers can't get served anything butcher than a sherry flip; he wanders off to the restroom more casually than any character I have seen since a pre-Code and incarnates a dilemma as old as the fourth estate when he concludes his spellbinding invocation of a stopped press with the rueful comedown, "I picked a great night to quit the business. I'm an eyewitness to a Pulitzer Prize story and can't even get to a telephone." The glamorously combative Freddy, played by Virginia Field with a dangerously mercurial intelligence under her telegram stop of a laugh, is doing her best to put away martinis like Prohibition's coming back into style, but William Conrad's Chuckles looks out for her as dourly and conscientiously as he does all of the customers he disparages to their faces as "crumbs." Character actors all, we can't tell from their billing whether they'll survive or be disposed of, break or show spirit when the chips are down, but the film almost never loses sight of them as people rather than ciphers of irony or mortality. When the first shot is fired in the Oasis Bar, it doesn't just suck the air out of the room—Skip looks suddenly far too young for fatherhood, Harry shocked old. Not until after Wyckoff has motioned to bolt and chain the door does one of the women scream, as if the reality of the horror has taken that long to hit home. We are conditioned even by film noir to expect philosophy when people are brought up short against the prospect of their deaths. Dial 1119 gives us a lot more of being sarcastic and scared: "And you better leave God out of it, too. God's got other fish to fry besides you."
Wyckoff himself complicates the picture, even when I am not entirely confident that the picture understands to what extent. Played by the clean-cut, collegiate Marshall Thompson, he makes a strikingly modern, pop-culturally recognizable killer, his calmly detached affect something very different from the standard tells of Hollywood craziness even when he's classily introduced by a special police bulletin as "a recent fugitive from the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane." He's polite, undeterrable, not inhuman; as he paces the bar, haranguing the hostages with disjointed fragments of a nightmarish beach landing, a battlefield promotion refused, the broken promises of peacetime, until he seems to confuse the police sniper he just shot through the ducts of the air conditioning with the enemy he faced behind the dunes, he embodies with unusual bluntness the post-war fear of the disturbed veteran. "I'm a good man with a gun," he boasts bitterly, a mid-century forgotten man. "Who gave it to me? Who told me to use it?" The reality that nobody did—that Wyckoff was drafted and bounced out 4-F and never served in WWII at all—may be even more compelling, however, a cop-out in the sense that it dodges the specter of the home-front killer that will reappear more insistently over the coming decade, but dead-on in the questions it uncorks about American violence, how it is legitimized, who gets to use it. "You made yourself believe you were a soldier because you knew that soldiers were the only people permitted to kill without committing a crime." It's nastier than a mere case of stolen valor. Wyckoff's appropriation of war trauma has given him not just what he disingenuously construes as a doctor's note for homicide, but a heroized smokescreen for the insecurities that led him to hoard all the guns and military histories from which he confabulated his service in an accidentally timeless touch of psychopathology. It goes by almost too fast to catch in the babble of reporters, but the murder he committed because he couldn't face the truth of his civilian war was of a woman. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to wonder if he "like[s] a gun in [his] hand" because it assuages the same fragile masculinity that plagues so much of our open-carry landscape. None of this nuance survives the wave function collapse of the ending which vindicates the expediency of state violence without seeming to notice the attention it calls to the right of the police to kill with the soldier's impunity, but it does make it at least a little clever that the person who finally draws a bead on Wyckoff isn't a man. He looks more than betrayed, he looks petulantly cheated by her apologetically helpless shrug, as if she didn't know what he was expecting. Even he seems to realize that "You had no right to shoot me" isn't exactly a gunman's dream epitaph.
Of all things, this confused little artifact looks fantastic, thanks to the gratuitously inventive cinematography of Paul Vogel which match-cuts the chug of a blender with the whir of a fan, cues the authority of an argument by filming it in shadowy reflection, and lines up the hostages on their bar stools between the glitter of glasses like targets in a shooting gallery; keeping time with the shortening news cycle, it gives the last word to the indifference of normality reasserting itself, the crowd breaking up as the TV crew coils up their cables and the survivors resume the routines of their lives. I like the casual inclusion of the eyewitness played by Argentina Brunetti whose monoglot Italian has to be translated by a police interpreter. I have perhaps even less sympathy than intended for a self-image shored by combat fantasies since my grandfather was 4-F in World War II and didn't get weird about it. As if the flatscreen TV weren't anachronism enough, the title comes from the central emergency number urged by the news flash that fatefully broadcasts Wyckoff's mug shot into the Oasis: "If you see this man, call the police—dial 1119!" It came from TCM's Noir Alley, but can be found hanging around the Internet Archive, where if you tap out on the psychiatry there's always the eight-and-a-half-inch lens. This right brought to you by my exciting backers at Patreon.
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