Telephone Operator

Lively, well-made programmer from lowly Monogram, with a great look at how telephoning used to work. Get a load of the old-time technology, back when calls had to go through switchboards with operators to plug you in to your party, maybe requiring row after row of nimble fingered women. It's quite a sight and contrast to today's magical cell-phones.

Seems Red and humorous sidekick Shorty are linemen who keep the phone lines operating across long distances. It's a heckuva job, climbing high poles in all kinds of weather. Plot-wise Red's got a crush on cutie operator Helen who's plenty distant at first. But of course things warm up when they battle to keep lines working during a monster rain and flood.

Happily, there's plenty of snappy dialog as the characters bounce off one another before settling down, while director Pembroke keeps things moving. Then too, the raging flood footage blends in skillfully with the dramatics to create a bigger budget effect. And catch the artful rising water in the phone office; that had to be studio sets, but you'd never know it. The humorous asides are also well modulated and smoothly inserted. It helps too, that the actors appear geared into their roles, especially Allen who centers the film.

All in all, for a programmer, it's extremely well-crafted, showing that budget need not determine quality when, thanks to a common effort, the elements come skillfully together.

The version I downloaded from the Internet Archive must be heavily cut, as it's only 53m. Despite this inexcusable decimation, I found this flick to be quite satisfying, for what it is. We've got cocksure telephone linesmen, surly switchboard operators, kids with shortwave radios, a failing dam, and a terrific flood - 30's style, and stuffed into little more than an hour! The cast are all sufficiently capable in their roles, particularly leads Allen and Withers, but it was the colorful details that really sustained my interest. Things like Helen's kid brother setting his alarm for 5 so he can listen to a Boy Scout rally from England on the shortwave. The film is a nifty little time capsule of the 1930's telecommunications industry at work, and its importance to daily life in that decade.

Grant Withers and Warren Hymer are two tough line men for the company. They come to Riverdale, where they set their sights on operators Judith Allen and Alice White.

Given director Scott Pembroke's grounding in comedy -- he was the director of Stan Laurel's burlesques of big hits, like RUPERT OF HEEHAW and DOCTOR PYCKLE AND MISTER PRYDE, you'd think the comedy bits in this early Monogram would be better; well, Miss White is pretty good, but the other actors are rather lugubrious. Until the big finale, it's all tough guys in leather jackets and fedoras pounding on each other, and slow-and-steady progress in the romantic plots.

The big set piece is the flood, and that's handled using stock footage of floods and ranks of telephone operators standing at their boards, while voice-overs tell people "There's a flood. Tell your neighbors." Oh, so that's why the third floor of my house is underwater?

Actually it's a decent movie until that repeated voice-over. Not bad for a Poverty Row Second Feature. Withers is typically fine. t's just that the finale goes on too long.

This potboiler B film from Monogram is a salute to that unsung group of heroines, the telephone switchboard operators. And for a product coming from Monogram Pictures this thing was a piece of cinematic art.

Grant Withers and Warren Hymer are a pair of telephone linemen who arrive in town on a new assignment and find romance with switchboard operators Judith Allen and Alice White. It's a bit of rough going with Withers and Allen and even rougher going with Withers and new boss Pat Flaherty.

And Flaherty has his own problems with a young wife out stepping with the engineer in charge of the local dam Cornelius Keefe. For reasons only explained that Flaherty is such a nice guy all of them try to protect him from the scandal and all of them get in trouble because of it.

Everyone's problems gets washed away when Keefe's dam bursts in a flood. At that point Allen and White are a pair of heroines keeping the switchboard open as a center of communication as the flood waters rise.

For a Monogram Picture the editing of newsreel flood footage into the film is nicely done as that studio did not have a true special effects department. In fact it will stand up to several of the major studios in terms of how good it was.

Not a bad B picture and for Monogram it was great art.

Not sure how this film is getting such a high rating, there are other films that would deserve a higher one and aren't going past the 6 out of ten mark.

Anyways, this is really dull stuff. I watch a lot of old cheap production of the day, most of this stuff is free domain and can be watched on archive.org. The majority involves the same formulas, but there is always something charming about them that really gets to you. Most of them, however, are simply cheap and dull.

This one film is based around the fling between two telephone operating ladies and two linemen, which takes place in the middle of a rainstorm that turns into a disaster when the dam breaks. I'm not into disaster films, I find them two dimensional crap, but when a film is so evenly divided into two parts - the cheesy romantic comedy with the usual sketchy characters, and the dramatic disaster flick which it turns into towards the end - it's hard to know why anyone would consider it worth watching. Furthermore, the lines in this film are not memorable at all, and seem to be the rejects from the famous one liners that were in films of the time.

Plus, speaking of dialogue, I realise the speech of those times was different, and I really do like it, don't get me wrong. But even I can get fed up of hearing 'gee that's swell' or 'that's fine' in the same tone of voice. Eventually you think everyone is trying to be a louder version of Humphrey Bogart (one of my heroes).