Dial 1119 (MGM, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night, after the Father Brown episode on PBS, I switched to Turner Classic Movies for Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” presentation of a film I didn’t have much hope for, but which turned out to be surprisingly good: Dial 1119, a 1950 75-minute film from MGM that was a “B” movie in all but name, since it was relatively short and didn’t have any major stars. The only even semi-name in the cast was Leon Ames, cast as a sleazy slimeball dirty old man who keeps making passes at attractive young women and offering to take them on vacations even though he’s already got a wife. It may be the least sympathetic part I’ve ever seen Ames in, as well as the nastiest character in the movie even though the lead role is that of a psychopathic killer. The plot is simple: mad killer Gunther Wyckoff (Marshall Thompson) has escaped from a mental institution for the criminally insane after serving three years. He returns to his old home town, Terminal City, to hunt down and kill the psychiatrist whose testimony sent him there, Dr. John Faron (Sam Levene), though he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that without Dr. Faron’s testimony that he was insane, he would have been sentenced to death and executed already. On his way into Terminal City, he steals the bus driver’s gun and, when the driver demands that Wyckoff return it, he shoots the driver dead. Then he seeks refuge in the Oasis bar, run by bartender “Chuckles” (William Conrad), and he holds hostage the five people already in the bar: Earl (Leon Ames), woman professional executive Freddy (Virginia Field) whom he’s trying to convince to go home with him, “hard girl” Helen (Andrea King), drunken reporter Harrison D. Barnes (James Bell, best known for his two films for Val Lewton, as the drunken relative in I Walked with a Zombie and the psycho killer himself in The Leopard Man) and Skip (Keefe Brasselle), a young man who’s anxious because his wife is in the hospital about to give birth to their baby.

Alerted to Wyckoff’s presence in town because they found the bus driver’s body and lifted a fingerprint off the rear-view mirror they identified as his, the police surround the Oasis and worry about how they can get in and rescue the hostages. Wyckoff tells the hostages a story about how his insanity started when he was left alone on Normandy beach during D-Day and had to keep killing German defenders one by one, only just as we’ve assumed this is going to be a PTSD story and Wyckoff is going to be at least a semi-sympathetic character turned into a murderer by the stresses of combat, [spoiler alert!] Dr. Faron enters the bar at his own request, overruling the better judgment of police captain Henry Keiver (Richard Rober), and tells the hostages that Wyckoff’s story is so much B.S. Instead Wyckoff tried to enlist but was rejected because the Army decided he was too crazy for them, and Wyckoff “rewards” the doc’s honesty by shooting him dead. Wyckoff also shoots and presumably kills – he’s alive when he’s pulled out of the air ducts but we’re told his prognosis isn’t good – a slightly built police sharpshooter who’s sent in via the club’s air conditioning system to take a shot at Wyckoff without harming the hostages. Captain Keiver and Dr. Faron get into an argument before Dr. Faron joins the list of Wyckoff’s victims about the relative merits of incarceration vs. execution, with Captain Keiver making the point that if Dr. Faron hadn’t butted in and found Wyckoff insane, the bus driver, the sharpshooter cop and Dr. Faron himself would still be alive. (It was a powerful enough scene it made me at least momentarily doubt my long-term opposition to the death penalty.) Eventually, after Helen grabs the bartender’s gun and tries to kill Wyckoff, only to have him tell her, “You shouldn’t have tried to shoot me,” the cops use C4 explosive to blow open the back door of the bar (we’re told it had been a speakeasy during Prohibition, so its doors were unusually heavy and almost impenetrable) and pick off Wyckoff while rescuing the five hostages, who go on about their merry or not-so-merry ways. Freddy regains her self-respect and turns down Earl’s blandishments, Earl makes a pass at Helen and she laughs in his face, Skip finally gets through to the hospital and learns he’s the father of a daughter, and Harrison gets the mother of all scoops: an insider account of what it felt like being held hostage by a crazed killer.

Dial 1119 is a film that has a lot of premonitions of later developments in society and technology – the TV in the Oasis bar is a 40-inch flat screen at a time when such sets wouldn’t exist for almost another half-century; the film’s title is an emergency number for calling the police that likewise didn’t exist yet (in 1957 a nationwide association of fire departments asked the Federal Communications Commission to create a three-digit universal emergency number, but they didn’t do it until 1968, and though there’s no evidence the FCC was inspired to make that number “911” on the basis of the one in this film, it is one hell of a coincidence) – and it’s also a film rich in allusions and symbolism, surprisingly so for a cheap film with mostly one set that could almost as easily have been done on stage. The town where it takes place is “Terminal City” – a destination that will indeed be “terminal” for Wyckoff’s victims and, in the end, for Wyckoff himself. The bar is called the “Oasis” (which is anything but true for its unfortunate occupants), and there’s a motto on its wall reading, “Time and tide wait for no man.” The drugstore across the street from the Oasis bar where the cops set up their headquarters is called the Rialto, and the TV station that covers the standoff live has the call letters WKYL (either “we kill” or “why kill?”). Dial 1119 was the feature-film directorial debut of Gerald Mayer, Louis B. Mayer’s nephew, and despite his uncle’s horribly negative attitude towards film noir as a genre Mayer manages to create a terrific atmosphere and keep the story moving while maintaining suspense. (Later Mayer would focus on television and, among other credits, he would reunite with William Conrad on the early-1980’s Nero Wolfe TV series, with Mayer as director/producer and Conrad as Wolfe.)

Mayer also gets a marvelously dry and understated performance from Marshall Thompson, who portrays the psychopath very much in the style of today rather than the eye-rolling hulking manner of Lawrence Tierney, then the screen’s dominant go-to guy for roles like this. Thompson makes it clear that Wyckoff is crazy and has been all along, while at the same time we feel a bit sorry for him even though we also recognize him as an amoral monster. The script is by Don McGuire (who as an actor had played in a film very much like this one, The Threat, at RKO in 1949, though the main difference was that in The Threat the environment where the psycho killer was holding the normal people hostage was a rural shack rather than an urban bar) and Hugh King, who came up with the “original” story John Monks, Jr. later turned into a screenplay. The cinematography is by Paul C. Vogel, MGM’s go-to guy for the noir look then, and the music score is by the young André Previn. Dial 1119 is a real “sleeper,” a film from which one expects routine that turns out to be phenomenally well done, though Eddie Muller’s intro made an attempt to relate it to modern-day mass shootings that really doesn’t work. Today a Gunther Wyckoff would walk into that bar with a legally obtained AR-15 and turn everybody inside into hamburger in a matter of seconds!