Phone Call from a Stranger
1952, directed by Jean Negulesco
The title of Phone Call from a Stranger refers ostensibly to the three phone calls David Trask makes to the families of his three deceased co-passengers after the plane crash, each call leading to a visit and an emotional reconciliation. Perceptive viewers will notice, however, that the title only points to a single phone call, and that it actually refers to the phone call at the end when Trask calls his own wife. Her affair with another man, and David’s inability to reconcile with her, had left husband and wife strangers to each other, so that he’s as much a stranger in that call as he is in the other three. To realize this adds to the film’s emotional punch, but there’s a hidden metaphor in the first half that does even better.
The journey to Los Angeles is split into two flights, with an ironic difference. The first leg goes through a massive thunderstorm that seems to span half the continent. Lightning, winds, fog, and rain buffet the plane all the way from the heartland to the western mountains, and the script makes a big deal of Binky Gay’s fear of flying through such a storm on her first airplane trip. Not only is the weather bad, it’s also dark all the way. The second leg picks up the next morning under calm skies in full daylight, but the wings are icy. Despite fearsome signs, the first flight gets through the storm, but despite reassuring signs the next day, the plane crashes. In scene after scene the movie tells us that we needn’t fear the storms in our relationships as much as we should fear the ice that hardens feelings, chills relationships, and cracks families apart.
David Trask breaks through that ice when he brings Dr. Fortness’s teenage son back to his mother; when he reveals the truth to the doctor’s surviving family; when he softens Binky’s mother-in-law’s heart; and when he sets the record straight with Binky’s husband. He approaches each meeting without strategy, only with faith and good will, so that in the third meeting he’s unexpectedly rewarded for his good deeds. Mrs. Hoke breaks the ice in David Trask’s heart, facilitating his return to his wife. We needn’t take the film’s word for this rule of storms and ice – all it asks of us is to consider whether it holds true in our own lives.
The metaphor is borne out again and again, and it’s drawn thoroughly. Figurative storms like Jane’s affair or the other families’ misfortunes have power to reroute our lives, as the literal storm reroutes the airplane, but they’re not as pernicious as the ice that stifles intimacy. Like the airplane, we go through rough weather blindly… but when we settle into coldness, the path ahead looks deceptively clear. It’s no accident that the trip is on Grand Canyon Airways, whose name describes what’s at the heart of Phone Call from a Stranger – the seemingly uncrossable gulfs between people who should be close to each other.
The storm and the ice convey the essence of Phone Call from a Stranger, but there are psychological and social insight to be had for digging further. For starters, we might ask why David has to lie on his first two visits. On his way out, Mrs. Fortness asks whether her husband had been drinking when they talked, and he answers, “Of course not. I don’t take cases from drunks.” In fact the doctor had been drinking, though not excessively… but to admit this would have left Mrs. Fortness with the wrong impression. For better or for worse, Trask calculated that the literal truth would have been misleading, and he wanted to tell a higher truth. His lie also echoes the lie she had told to the prosecutor in the hospital room, as if he’s chosen to shoulder her guilt in exchange for peace in the family.
His second lie is more egregious. After Binky Gay’s mother-in-law, Sally Carr, feeds him a transparently distorted account of Binky’s departure for Broadway, David replies with a concocted tale in which Binky wins a leading role in South Pacific and graciously recommends her mother-in-law for a plum supporting role. Like David’s lie on his previous visit, this echoes a lie told by the person hearing it. Negative film footage brackets each untrue flashback, stressing the backwardness of the narration within. Still, the point of David’s lie isn’t to repay one wrong with another. He must know that Sally Carr is likely to discover the truth sooner or later, especially if she inquires about her offer from Rodgers and Hammerstein. He also calculates that when she finds out, she will already have admitted to herself that she had been unfair to Binky, and in so admitting she’ll live at peace with Binky’s memory.
There may be a benign logic behind David Trask’s lies, but his first two visits set a pattern that needs to be broken. By bringing charity at the expense of truth, he verges on playing God, in the sense that he sets the rules for each encounter. He restrains the Fortness kid to keep him from running away a second time, and he adopts a superior attitude in Sally Carr’s nightclub. The third visit reverses the pattern. Now he’ll be compelled to listen; he’ll be the one to receive charity; and he’ll have to yield to Mrs. Hoke’s wisdom. The scene depends on Bette Davis’s acting talent, and the fact that Merrill and Davis were married in real life intensifies the chemistry between them. We can fully believe that this confident lawyer is brought down to earth, paving the way for his return home.
Just as David Trask tells forgivable lies on his first two visits, the film tells two benign lies in its opening credits. Trask is supposed to live in Midland City, a fictional city in Iowa, but his cab ride to the airport takes him through downtown Chicago, with the famous Chicago Theatre marquee plainly visible. There’s also a blatant continuity error as the cab repeats its path down State and Madison Streets. The repetition, in its clumsy way, foreshadows the duality of the two airplane flights which are so important to understanding the film, and the placement in Iowa, which contradicts the title backgrounds, also has a certain logic. The filmmakers seem to have consciously wished to route the story from the plain old Midwest to glamorous Los Angeles – a curious decision, given that all we see of Los Angeles, especially the Hoke residence, is resolutely ordinary.
The premise of a woman and three men linking up on a trip from farm country to a glamorous city is a strong echo of The Wizard of Oz. Like Dorothy and her companions sleeping in the poppy field, they touch ground in the middle of their journey (their stopover is in Vega, a thinly veiled stand-in for Las Vegas, whose seductive attractions are like the opiates in a poppy). There’s more than one way to map the characters from one movie onto the other, but Binky Gay is afraid of flying, Hoke plays the fool, Fortness acted heartlessly in his past, and Trask will return home. Sally Carr and Mrs. Hoke are loosely like the wicked witch and Glinda. These parallels are surely not meant to be seen. They may have helped screenwriter Nunnally Johnson to structure the film, but they also contribute to the effect of the ending when Trask’s homecoming is ordained.
The characterization of the “Four Musketeers” goes deeper, with at least two further layers of hidden structuring. Each traveler comes from one of the most basic sectors of society: law, art, commerce, and science. There’s a lawyer, an actress, a salesman, and a doctor, and the balance among them reflects a real balance in the United States after the New Deal, when no single sector was allowed to dominate. It’s not quite a classless society – Dr. Fortness is clearly wealthier than the others – but they’re equal enough to mix seamlessly and be friends. Of course the country was no utopia in the 1950s, and the movie acknowledges both racial and sexual inequality, first when Sally Carr fires a black worker unjustly, and then when Mrs. Hoke tells Trask, “Few men” can support the memory of an infidelity. “Only the strongest. Many, many wives, of course, but only a few very strong husbands.” Though her statement praises women, it also admits their social disadvantage.
If the four companions represent four basic quadrants of society (the opening titles foreshadow this too, as State and Madison Streets divide Chicago into its four quadrants), the most obvious missing sector is religion – but this too is covered. An American audience in 1952 would have understood that Trask’s three friends would likely have come from the nation’s three most visible religions, i.e. that Binky Gay was Catholic, Eddie Hoke was Jewish, and Robert Fortness was Protestant. Trask is harder to pin down, as befits a protagonist in a story that aims to express a universal insight into human relationships.
The purposeful diversity of the four main characters along so many different axes – personality, occupation, and religion – underscores how basic the need for intimacy is, and how serious are the consequences of frozen relationships that make strangers of our closest friends and family.
CONNECTIONS:
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari – Flashback told by an unreliable narrator to promote his/her own virtue
The Wizard of Oz – Character flees the Great Plains for an exciting city, meets three friends with different problems, and learns there’s no place like home; travelers touch ground in the middle of their journey
Dead Reckoning – Fictional American cities (Gulf City, Midland City); story told through flashbacks
Such a Pretty Little Beach – Telling repetition in the opening disguised as a simple continuity error
Rear Window – Negative image(s) used to signal a backward view of things
Nazarín – Giver of charity accepts charity in the end
Charulata – Storm used as a metaphor for an infidelity
Where Is My Friend’s Home? – Character’s quest to perform good deed(s); lesson expressed through a duality (two plane flights, two doormakers)
The Cook the Thief His Wife and Her Lover – Symbolic division of society into four sectors: law/government, commerce, art, & science/intellect, with religion thrown into the mix