Bells Are Ringing

A film that deserves more discussion: Vincente Minnelli's some-kind-of-wonderful Bells Are Ringing (1960).  Part of a squeaky (but ever-so-slightly naughty), brightly colored pocket of late '50s/early '60s Hollywood (think of Doris Day in Pillow Talk or Please Don't Eat the Daisies), the theme is communication.  Telephones, answering services, urban anonymity and its talking cure ("Hello!"), code (Beethoven's 10th), name-dropping, typewriting, an entire host of ways to get through to someone end up contriving greater difficulties & subtleties in actually doing just that.  It's not an original topic, but it's handled with some spark here.  I love the moment when Judy Holliday dances the chacha - so as not to forget it - in her red dress before she meets her fella (Dean Martin) for a party, a fine & simple flourish between director and star.  The basement apartment that Susanswerphone calls home is a cousin to the apartment in My Sister Eileen ('55), if I recall. 

But what am I writing?  There's someone who already said things better ...

"Telephony suggests telepathy. When Ella goes to visit Jeff for the first time, it just so happens that he wants coffee and a sandwich to help him kick his alcohol habit, and it just so happens that she’s got both in her bag. A nice piece of womanly white-magic, and all rationally explained because it’s her own lunch, which she daren’t admit, partly because she’s pretending to be chic Melisande. Communication by feeding—the mother, the housewife— in a placidly unpointed antithesis to the swish blind-date dinner. To explain how she can anticipate Jeff’s wishes, Ella has to pretend to be telepathic and psychic, which is the ideal type of communication (indeed, frighteningly so). And telepathy finds its converse in—is it a duet, is it a pair of synchronized solos, and what’s the difference?—"Better than a dream," dreaming and telepathy being a natural pair of intrapsychic opposites."  (Raymond Durgnat, transcribed here.)