- Gerald Mayer's Dial 1119 is a very short, very intense film about a dangerous escapee from a mental institution. When we first meet Gunther Wyckoff (Marshall Thompson), he's riding the bus with a glazed-over look on his face, but apparently he's just fixated on the bus driver's gun. After turning said gun on said driver, Wyckoff ducks into a bar just in time to spot his own face on the televised evening news. Now he's got a room full of hostages, a loaded gun, and a world-sized chip on his shoulder.
- The hostages are an eclectic bunch. One of the bartenders (William Conrad) is a world-weary grouch who refers to his patrons, including a tipsy regular (Virginia Field), as "crumbs." His assistant (Keefe Brasselle) is much more upbeat, probably because his wife is expecting a baby any minute now. There's a nervous twenty-something (Andrea King) who is certainly not the creepy older man's (Leon Ames) niece, even if he insists on introducing her as such. There's also a sad sack news reporter (James Bell), who picked the most exciting night of his life to quit his job. Although I mentioned six people, only five of them actually live long enough to properly be called hostages.
- Outside the bar, the police captain (Richard Rober) wants Wyckoff dead and refuses to send in police psychologist Dr. Faron (Sam Levene) to help. Instead, in the film's most nerve-wracking scene, the police attempt an infiltration through the air conditioning unit, but that's exactly the sort of ploy that the paranoid Wyckoff was expecting. Now it's up to Dr. Faron to talk Wyckoff into surrendering...or at least to distract him long enough that he doesn't have the chance to kill any more innocent people. Considering how readily Wyckoff fires his gun, that will prove to be quite the challenge.
- In his full-length directorial debut, Mayer (nephew of MGM's Louis B. Mayer) does a terrific job maintaining the tension throughout Dial 1119's meager 75-minute runtime. He also has a lot of fun moving the camera around, with one great shot panning around the exterior of a bus to reveal the wonderfully bleak name "Terminal City" and another moving across the horrified group of hostages when they first realize what Wyckoff truly is. The film's best shot, however, may be its last, which rises up from the street overflowing with citizens, police, and reporters, which you may also recognize as the most famous shot from Chinatown. While Mayer deserves a lot of the credit for this one, he is helped considerably by Thompson, who uses a blank stare and a weird air of detachment to create a truly menacing screen presence.
- And yes, that was June Cleaver (Barbara Billingsley) on the phone at the newspaper.
