The CRPF "Old Phones in Movies & TV" Compilation

[McHeath]

Have not seen Revolutionary Road, but I know how out of period stuff can make it harder to get into a movie or show, you keep bumping into things that are not supposed to be there and it jars you out of the moment. 

One of our sons loaned us his first season DVDs of Madmen, thinking that with our fondness for the post war era we'd enjoy the show.  Well, we didn't.  For me, I just kept bumping into the inaccurate historical sets, props, ideas, and attitudes.  For example, in the pilot set in 1960 a women introduces a new secretary to her desk and all it's fancy high tech gear, a rotary 500 and an electric typewriter.  The typewriter is an IBM Selectric I, not introduced until the next year, and the 500 had a clear plastic fingerwheel and what looked like a modular cord. 

Now a lot of people might say that I'm being a pick, that who cares if the materials used are not exact to the year, it's the basic thought that counts and I need to relax and just enjoy the picture.  Shows like Madmen are not really about being exact anyway, they might say, it's just about getting some of the feel of the era.

But still, if I'm watching a show set in 1960 I expect the makers to have tried to at least get the material history right, and if they are blowing the material history then what about the rest?  Is this really a picture about the past, or just a picture about how we think about the past?   

When I do Civil War Reenacting some of the stuff done by other reenactors in their kits is annoying.  I recall one time noticing that the fellow in front of me had a spun aluminum canteen, Swedish I believe, and circa the 1970s.  Another fellow once had a plastic canteen with a Mexican wool blanket cover and a nylon strap, probably bought it at Wal-Mart.  There is one fellow who portrays a Confederate Cav man from Virginia and he carries a Henry rifle. 

Like seeing Kate Winslet crying while talking on a modular G14 handset in your clip from Revolutionary Road, it ruins the moment for me.  I think, if we can't be bothered to get the phone/canteen/rifle/whatever it is right, then what else is wrong and why bother?  What the heck, let's just have Confederate soldiers with M-1 Garands, and put Kate on an iPhone with a rotary dial app. 

[jsowers]

A fellow phone collector sent me a DVD of the movie The Reluctant Astronaut with Don Knotts.  It was made in 1968.  Despite the date of the film so far in the first fifteen minutes (that's all I've watched) there has been a yellow 554 with dark handset cord (may be gray, may be black--hardwired) and a close shot with lots of conversation on a Mediterranean Blue 500 with gray coiled cord.

I was the collector who sent Dennis the DVD of The Reluctant Astronaut. I love old movies and I always look for old phones in movies. Here are three screen shots off YouTube from The Reluctant Astronaut. The first two are of the 554 in the concession stand. The second one is Don trying to talk on the phone with his astronaut helmet still on. Like Dennis said, that cord could be black or dark gray. If you look closely, the strain relief is yellow. I've never seen that before, but I have seen a dark gray cord with a red covering over the wires inside the handset. The third screen shot is of the dark blue phone in the house.

Sorry for the grainy quality of the screen shots, but my DVD of this movie gives me black screens when I try to capture it with Gadwin. I've tried two different computers and get the same result. If anyone knows how to fix that, I'd love to know how. Being a computer technician, I suppose I should know, but I don't deal with capturing DVDs often.

[Steve]

 You have to turn off hardware acceleration in properties.

 right click on desktop and click properties, click settings tab, click advanced, troubleshoot, then slide hardware acceleration to the left (off).

 you can turn it back on when you are done taking screenshots.

[jsowers]

 You have to turn off hardware acceleration in properties.

 right click on desktop and click properties, click settings tab, click advanced, troubleshoot, then slide hardware acceleration to the left (off).

 you can turn it back on when you are done taking screenshots.

Thanks, Steve. That worked fine. One more picture, a cropped one, showing the dark blue phone in use. The actor is Arthur O'Connell, who plays Don's father, the war hero. I think they used old phones in this movie because everything in the house is old. Almost everything in the entire town is old. They have a DC-3 at their airport. Only the cars are recent models.

[jsbrugg]

I just happened to catch this film on Hulu yesterday and I happened to recognise this phone thanks to Stephen Furley's thread about the British 300 and the WE 302s.  They happened to showcase the phone in the middle and I recognised it by the little pullout tray at the base.

The movie is called Lisa and I don't know when it was released, but it took place in Europe in the late 40s.  This scene has the lead (a Dutch Policeman) in an office in Scotland Yard. 

[Bill]

You have to turn off hardware acceleration in properties.

Hey, Steve, thanks for that tip! I have not had a problem with Gadwin, but I did have it with another screen capture program, and never did know how to fix it.

Now, do you have a tip for making Gadwin's capture window scroll up or down so you can capture a screen-and-a-half of stuff?

Amazing what you can learn on a phone forum. Thanks.

Bill

[Steve]

 Glad I could help.

I dont know anything about Gadwin, I just use the print screen key on my keyboard then open up a blank paint window. hit ctrl + v to paste into paint.

[HobieSport]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042041/

[McHeath]

Car phones in 1949, so cool it's scary.  First cell phone I ever used was a Motorola car phone in about 1990, felt like I was some sort of secret agent. 

[JorgeAmely]

Besides the phones, those hats look really cool.

[HobieSport]

Besides the phones, those hats look really cool.

I honestly don't know why we stopped wearing fedoras.  I find them very comfortable and classy, but I guess I feel a bit pretentious wearing one these days.  Perhaps I could get away with it by being considered an eccentric old dude.

Heath, somewhere I read about those early car-phone-radios.  I think they involved a large transmitter/receiver housed in the trunk of the car.  Funny, when I looked up "car phone" on wikipedia, they don't mention anything earlier than the 1970s.

[jsowers]

The movie Bells Are Ringing (1960) was on Turner Classic Movies last week. Did anyone else see it? It may be one of the all-time champion movies for the sheer amount of phones seen on the screen. After the opening title, it starts with a mock commercial for "Susanswerphone" featuring closeups of 500 sets in all sorts of colors. I posted them two to a page, but in the movie they're seen only one phone at a time in full CinemaScope frame, and they only stay on the screen about three seconds each, while a song plays in the background and you hear different pitch phone bells ringing.

In order, they are light gray, yellow, moss green, white, pink (or maybe light beige) and a very interesting red with a straight red cord. This is a very rare phone! Around summer 1956, before coil cords became mandatory, the straight cords on some colors of 500 sets matched the housing, like the mounting cord. I feel safe in assuming the red one is soft plastic, but the others may be a combination considering all color sets used hard plastic by 1960.

This is just the beginning. Stay tuned for part two. Below is a link to the trailer for the movie and it has a different format, with three phones on the screen at the same time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io9AjJxwuGI

[jsowers]

More from Bells Are Ringing. The first picture is more from the commercial at the beginning. It shows a light beige 500 in a woman's apartment. The bottom picture is a woman clad only in a towel. She heard her pink bedroom 500 ringing while in the shower and ran to answer it, only to have it stop ringing. So she shoved it onto the floor! I bet the phone company didn't like that at all.

Now for some cheesecake!    The top picture is the same woman, now dressed for her date, but wondering what to do. Her pink 500 seems to have survived unscathed from its trip to the floor, but the handset is on the wrong way round. Funny that in the beginning it's seen this same way, and when she tosses it on the floor, it's back on the right way. The bottom picture is a woman who finally found her aqua blue 500 in her messy bedroom by following the long mounting cord across her bed. That's all I have from the commercial. The rest of the phones are from the movie.

Susanswerphone is an answering service, which is something younger people won't remember in this day of voice mail and answering machines. Judy Holliday plays Ella Peterson, who runs the switchboard and gets overly involved in her customers' private lives. One of the customers is writer Jeffrey Moss, played by Dean Martin. He has a light beige 701 Princess with a long cord and a four-prong jack that came unplugged once and nobody could get him. Interestingly, Judy Holliday's first job was as a telephone operator on Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre (remember War of the Worlds?).

Sue (played by Jean Stapleton, who most of you know as Edith Bunker on All in the Family) owns the answering service and her boyfriend Otto (Eddie Foy, Jr.) is a crook, unbeknownst to her.  He gets Sue to install two phones to take and relay orders for records which are actually bets on horses. Here you see the phone man installing the two phones, a dark gray 500 with a straight line handset cord and a manual black 302. Where do you think they got that dark gray? Note the "Modern Homes Have Handy Phones" boxes they come in. Otto is on the dark gray 500 taking an order and Sue is on the black 302 relaying it to the shipping department. The way they disguise the orders is neat. Different composers are different horse tracks. Beethoven is Belmont Park, Shostakovich is Saratoga and Handel is Hialeah. What trips them up is an order for Beethoven's 10th Symphony and the grocery boy tells them he didn't write 10 symphonies, so they change it to 9, mess up everything and the mob gets mad.

There are lots of musical numbers in the movie, so if you don't like musicals, you're out of luck. It was originally a Broadway musical by Comden and Green. This was also Judy Holliday's last movie. She died in 1965.

The last picture shows Dean Martin on a payphone and it looks to be in the actual New York Subway because there's a train behind him.

[HobieSport]

Thanks for all the  great pics and info on Bells Are Ringing.  I'd never heard of it before. I'll give it a shot and watch it.

[Dennis Markham]

Great job on the photos and descriptions.  There are some great looking telephones there!  One of us out in collector land may own one of those by now.