Call Collect(ion): Great Phone Booth Scenes In Movies

06.23.10 | Gary Cahall | Staff NotesPrint this Post

The royal messenger in medieval costume dramas; the Pony Express rider from all those B-westerns; the telegraph delivery boy in most every type of ‘30s and '40s movie: All are ways that filmmakers have depicted communication through the ages. A once-common site on street corners around the world--the venerable pay telephone booth--is on the brink of joining these now-obsolete modes, a victim of technological advances and the omnipresent cell phone.

Its imminent passing into oblivion, however, means those filmmakers will have to find something to replace the all-purpose box that, along with being a way to reach out and touch someone, has served as a place of both refuge and danger, a vessel for emotional catharsis, a lethal weapon, and even a means of transportation. The following list demonstrates the phone booth’s versatility as a cinematic prop over the last half-century or so (And no, I didn’t forget two obvious films, the 2002 Colin Farrell thriller Phone Booth or the 2006 comedy/drama Mojave Phone Booth. I've never seen the latter, and, frankly, I didn't think the former was all that good.).

The Birds - Shock master Alfred Hitchcock loved to get the most suspense he could out of the smallest spaces imaginable (the shower in Psycho, the apartment in Rope, the lifeboat in...um, Lifeboat), and thus heroine Tippi Hedren finds herself trapped in a phone booth when the fine feathered fiends of Hitch’s 1963 horror classic launch their first all-out attack on the town of Bodega Bay, California, and start dive-bombing Hedren.

Dirty Harry - It’s a race against time--and a tour of pay phones along the streets of San Francisco--as  Magnum-toting detective Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) tries to catch up to the psychotic Scorpio (Andy Robinson) and locate the missing girl he’s buried alive somewhere in the city, in Don Siegel’s seminal 1971 cop actioner. And yes, if that plot point sounds familiar, it’s because Bruce Willis, with an assist from Samuel L. Jackson, ran a similar phone gauntlet in New York in 1995’s Die Hard with a Vengeance.

High Anxiety - Part of his spoofing of all things Hitchcockian in his 1977 comedy/thriller found director/co-writer/star Mel Brooks borrowing from both The Birds and Dial M for Murder. As he’s being strangled with the cord of a pay phone by a would-be killer (co-scripter Rudy De Luca), Brooks manages to dial girlfriend Madeline Kahn…who mistakes his choking cries for help as an obscene phone call.

Superman - In a cute shout-out to the comic strip (and cartoon and TV show) conventions of the past, where a phone booth to change clothes in was always handy, the Man of Steel (Christopher Reeve) glances briefly at a free-standing Metropolis street phone before running into an empty alley to doff his Clark Kent duds and save Lois Lane.

The Blues Brothers - Music-loving reprobates Jake (John Belushi) and Elwood (Dan Aykroyd) Blues seem to have nine lives in their eponymous 1980 laugh hit, as evidenced in the scene where a spurned (Carrie Fisher) ignites a propane tank next to the phone booth they’re standing in, sending everything up into the sky before crashing back down to Earth and leaving the fellas unhurt…and with plenty of pocket change.

Local Hero - Sent by boss Burt Lancaster to negotiate the sale of a remote Scottish village--whose sole telephone is a booth located by the beach--to make way for a refinery, American oil company executive Peter Riegert winds up falling in love with the hamlet and its people in Bill Forsyth’s 1983 comedy/drama. The booth, which figures prominently in the film’s haunting final scene, is actually located in the town of Pennan and has become a beloved tourist landmark.

Commando - Weaselly henchman Sully (David Patrick Kelly) learns to his eternal dismay that even a telephone booth can't offer sufficient protection from angry ex-Special Forces agent John Matrix (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who’s seeking his kidnapped daughter--and a heapin’ helpin’ of payback--in this 1985 action gem.

Jumpin’ Jack Flash - Someone else who learns that a phone booth doesn’t guarantee safety is New York bank worker Whoopi Goldberg, who gets locked into a phone booth and dragged around the Manhattan streets by KGB agents trying to learn what she knows about the British spy who’s been contacting her, in this 1986 action/comedy that marked Whoopi’s starring film debut.

Sid & Nancy- "They wouldn't send us any money! They said we'd spend it on drugs!" " We would!"   So ended a less-than-successful transatlantic call to her folks in America by punk groupie Nancy Spungen (Chloe Webb) and her boyfriend, Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious (Gary Oldman), in director Alex Cox's 1986 chronicle of the doomed couple's downward spiral.

Rain Man - Sometimes an unplanned and unscripted action during shooting--such as Dustin Hoffman passing gas while in a phone booth with sibling Tom Cruise, who reacts the way anybody would in such a situation--can turn into one of a film’s more unforgettable moments.

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure - So, California high school students and one-day saviors of humanity Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) manage to pass history thanks to a futuristic device that can travel through time and space and is disguised as an ordinary phone booth? Great idea! I wonder why no one every thought of it before (see below)?

Say Anything and High Fidelity - Is there an actor out there who has spent time on-screen time in rain-drenched phone booths than John Cusack? 1989 found his Lloyd Dobler pouring his heart out ("I gave her my heart. She gave my a pen." ) to big sister Constance (John's real-life sibling Joan) while it pours in Cameron Crowe's Say Anything, and 11 years later record store owner Cusack wound up in another glass-enclosed confessional, calling an ex-girlfriend as the rain comes down around him, in High Fidelity.

Dumb and Dumber - It may not matter now, but…should you ever find yourself waiting to use an occupied phone booth, don’t be like Anxious Man at Phone (Fred Stoller) in this 1994 Jim Carrey comedy and pester the person ahead of you, or you may get your lights punched out like he did, courtesy of short-fused thug Joe “Mental” Mentalino (Mike Starr).

The Matrix - In the groundbreaking 1999 sci-fi film, a simple telephone is a lifeline from the computer-generated realm of the Matrix to the less-than-hospitable real world, as Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss and their fellow rebels demonstrate on more than one occasion.

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy - Was there ever a more emotional phone booth sequence than when a distraught Ron (Will Ferrell), after his beloved dog Baxter is punted off a bridge by biker Jack Black, calls reporter pal Paul Rudd and says he’s “trapped in a glass case of emotion”? Well, maybe, but it’s hard to think of a funnier one.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - You’re never quite sure what will happen when you step into a London phone booth, and in this fifth entry in the fantasy film series, Arthur Weasley (Mark Williams) leads young Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) into one that’s a secret link to the subterranean offices of the Ministry of Magic.

Get Smart - There wasn’t a whole lot to recommend in this 2008 updating of the beloved ‘60s spy spoof sitcom, but at least secret agent Maxwell Smart (Steve Carrell) did use a top-secret phone booth to make his descent into CONTROL headquarters, just as original Smart Don Adams used to do decades earlier.

And, lastly and most famously…

Dr. Who and the Daleks and Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. - Sure, Bill and Ted’s phone booth time machine may have been sleeker and had more windows, but nothing beats a good old-fashioned London police box. A British TV fixture since 1963, Doctor Who made the jump to the big screen--in the mustached form of Peter Cushing-- in a pair of mid-1960s features that had the interplanetary hero battling his most implacable enemies, the metallic and malevolent Daleks. While both films strayed from their small-screen source, one constant was that Cushing and his companions travelled through time and space in the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space), a fantastic conveyance that's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Neither film is currently available on home video in the U.S., but with a renwed interest on this side of the Atlantic in all things Whovian, thanks to the revived BBC series, I'm optimistic that these entertaining--if not strictly canonical--adventures will eventually find their way onto DVD. After all, it's only a matter of time.