Bells Are Ringing

I've got way too many movies on my cloud DVR. A lot of the ones that I recorded off of FXM are coming up again in the FXM rotation, but there's a movie that I hadn't yet gotten around to doing a post on that's coming up on TCM. That movie is Bells Are Ringing, and you can see it tomorrow (January 24) at 5:45 PM on TCM.

The movie opens with an establishing scene about the wonders of something that will be an anachronism to any younger viewer who might happen to stumble across this movie: the professional telephone answering service, a service that could take messages especially for businesses that needed off-hours coverage, but also apparently for wealthy individuals. By the time I was a kid, the telephone answering machine was already coming into vogue, followed by the pager and then ubiquitous voice mail. Nowadays we have call centers that I suppose provide a similar service for large businesses, but this sort of answering service is a thing of the past, much like the party lines in Pillow Talk.

The answering service here is called "Susanswerphone", run by Sue (Jean Stapleton) with a few employees, among them Ella Peterson (Judy Holliday). Ella, in answering the phones, is supposed to be professional, but she's a little too professional, and in the wrong way, as she plays Santa for one client's young child, and tries to help various other clients solve their problems. This latter causes the company to be in a spot of trouble as the authorities think it might be a front for an escort service.

The company does become a front, although unwittingly. Otto Pranz (Eddie Foy, Jr.) is part of the bookie racket, taking bets on horse races. They need to increase volume, so he comes up with the brilliant idea of posing as a record label dealing in classical music, and using composers and works as code words for horses and race-tracks. So when Susanswerphone transmits those messages, the operators will think they're just giving messages about bulk record purchases. It isn't until one of Ella's friends hears her talking about Beethoven's Tenth Symphony -- any classical music fan would know he only wrote nine -- that things start to go wrong in that subplot.

Ella, meanwhile, has "friends", in the sense of the people whose lives she comes to know a bit about on the phone and whom she tries to help out. She gives a dentist the gumption to try his hand at songwriting and suggests a Marlon Brando wannabe (played rather hilariously by Frank Gorshin) dress better. The big one, however, is playwright Jeffrey Moss (Dean Martin). She gives him wake-up calls and disguises her voice as an older mother-type when talking on the phone to him. So when she shows up at his apartment he doesn't recognize her, never having seen her, and doesn't know these two are the same woman. He falls in love with the young Ella, but she doesn't fit into his world -- or so she thinks -- and disappears. Having not given her real name to him is going to make it difficult for him to find her again.

Bells Are Ringing is the sort of musical for people who like musicals. That sort of person is, sadly to say, not me. It's not that I hated Bells Are Ringing, however. It's more that I felt like I was seeing the flaws that come with trying to translate a stage musical to the screen. Most of the musical numbers seem way too artificial and stagebound, and there's nothing in this version of New York that feels like anything less than Hollywood soundstages and the MGM backlot. But, as I said, people who enjoy musicals will easily be able to overlook this stuff. The song "The Party's Over" has also become a standard in the 65 or so years since the stage musical premiered.

So, if I were trying to introduce movie musicals to people who aren't knowledgeable about the genre, I'd pick some other stuff first, likely one of the backstage musicals and/or something from Busby Berkeley. But for musical lovers, this version of Bells Are Ringing is definitely worth seeing.