Dial 1119

Plot synopsis:
Homicidal escaped mental patient Gunther Wyckoff (Marshall Thompson) arrives by bus in Terminal City. As he gets off, he is confronted by the bus driver for stealing his Colt pistol. Wyckoff uses it to kill the driver.
Wyckoff tries to locate a man named Dr. Faron, at both his office and then at his home address - an apartment building - with no luck. As he leaves the building, it is a warm night, and he notices the Oasis Bar across the street. He goes into the bar and finds there is a good vantage point to observe the entryway to the apartment building. The bar is tended by Chuckles and his assistant/relief-person Skip (whose wife is in hospital about to have a baby).
Chuckles, seeing a news flash story on the TV, notices Wyckoff is one of his customers and tries, unsuccessfully, to reach a pistol he has stashed behind the bar. At this point, there are four patrons in the bar: the sluttish barfly Freddy; the young Helen, who is accompanied by an attentive older gentleman, Earl; and newspaper reporter Harrison D. Barnes. Chuckles then tries to telephone the police, but Wyckoff shoots Chuckles dead as he is placing the call. Wyckoff then orders the bar patrons to occupy one table, where he can keep an eye on them. Meanwhile, the gunshot and subsequent scream by Helen attracts attention. As a beat police officer approaches the bar, he is shot in the leg by Wyckoff. Bystanders rescue the officer, and a call is made for reinforcements to respond to a man barricaded in the bar.
The five hostages discuss what might be going on with Wyckoff. The relief barman, when asked, notes the gun holds eight rounds, but while he is speaking, Wyckoff replaces the magazine with a new one.
Wyckoff calls the police. He demands the police stay away, but deliver Dr. Faron to the bar within 25 minutes or he will kill the hostages. It is revealed that Faron is the local police psychiatrist. The press set up TV coverage near the bar, while the crowd of onlookers grows.
As police discuss tactics, Faron is found and brought to the bar. Being a newspaperman, Harrison reminds the others that Wyckoff's crime was a big local story three years before. As Faron pleads with the police to let him attempt to handle Wyckoff, they try to enter the bar undetected. Wyckoff becomes aware of the attempted breach and seriously wounds an officer. Faron again pleads with the police, and says, "I demand that you let me do my job!", which Wyckoff sees on the TV. The police captain resents Faron's success at getting Wyckoff a light sentence the first time around. The police prepare a breach en masse with two minutes left before Wyckoff's deadline, but Faron slips away and enters the bar. He tries to convince Wyckoff he is delusional, but after some discussion, Wyckoff becomes agitated and shoots Faron dead.
The phone rings, and Skip knows it is the hospital calling about his wife. Desperate to answer, he struggles with Wyckoff; at the same moment, the police detonate an explosive charge and extinguish the lights. In the confusion, one of the hostages uses Chuckles under-counter gun to shoot Wyckoff. In shock, he staggers outside and is cut down by police gunfire. As he kneels over Faron's body, the police captain rhetorically asks an officer, "How far does man have to go to prove that he's right?"

Tags: insanity, suspenseful, murder, claustrophobic

Review:
After killing a bus driver, the baby faced young man seeks refuge in a bar and holds its patrons hostage.
The film is also notable as it was one of the first movies put out by MGM under new management which turned the company away from solely making big budget events.
A deranged young man, Gunther Wyckoff (whacko with a gun, played menacingly by Marshall Thompson in perhaps his best performance), shoots a city bus driver with the driver's own pistol, then holds up in a local bar using the patrons as hostages.
Ironically, Wyckoff does his own negotiating with the law, demanding to see the psychiatrist that is in charge of treating him.What a crew of hostages: A barfly willing to bed anyone who buys her a drink, an old married fool making arrangements for a weekend tryst with a sweet young thing, a young man whose wife is in delivery at the hospital, a zealous reporter whose newspaper editor thinks he's a joke, and Chuckles, the bartender, played by the dour William Conrad of radio's "Gunsmoke" and later TV's "Cannon" fame.
An alternate title was "The Violent Hour," which basically describes the plot of the film, approximately an hour's standoff between the psycho and the police who work to free the hostages unharmed.
Items that were curiosities at the time but are now part of everyday life: A flat-panel big screen TV, TV news hype, and, alas, crazies that for no reason shoot patrons who are total strangers.The chosen title, "Dial 1119," which today reminds the viewer of "Call 911," is a fitting one.
Dial 1119 (1950)The simple premise here is transcended by gritty, real acting and some nice filming and editing to make a great minor movie.
But when he gets to the town where the doctor lives, things go wrong, and he ends up with a set of hostages in a second story bar.
Police arrive and surround him, and the standoff begins.What happens next is partly formula, as each of the hostages has some kind of encounter with the man, either in trying to talk him out of things, or make a phone call for help, or eventually physically attack.
This is more of the gritty truth of what it might actually be like.Outside the bar, as the townspeople gather and the police strategize, it's a believable situation as well.
Eventually the doctor takes a chance and goes in to talk to the criminal in what is now an established profession of crisis negotiator.One fascinating aspect here, for 1950 especially, is the role of live television.
The technology that is implied for this kind of very large device isn't clear (they mention something in the movie which doesn't explain it, really, but which makes clear they know it's unusual for the time).There are several excellent (and familiar) actors in this tightly woven plot.
This is a most effective little thriller from 1950 concerning a disturbed killer who holds a group of people hostage in a bar.
The actors playing the various hostages are capable, however, and there's a nice sense of what city life was probably like at around this time.
What I liked about "Dial 1119" is that it's basically ignored as an example of film noir yet, for a film made in 1950, this thing was ahead of its time.
Good cast with William ("Cannon") Conrad as Chuckles the bartender, Leon ("Mr. Ed") Ames and Marshall ("Daktari") Thompson as the central character, our friendly neighborhood psycho.
Finally, you've got a love a film noir selection that takes place in Terminal City..
Marshall Thompson broke new casting grounds in playing the criminally insane escaped mental patient in Dial 1119.
MGM was one of the last big studios to put out a realistic type noir film like this one.Time and circumstances get six people trapped in a bar in the fictitious Terminal City where Thompson after taking a weapon from a bus driver and killing him over it, he holds up in a bar.
When the news comes over the bar television, Thompson shoots bartender William Conrad and holds the other customers which include Virginia Field, Andrea King, Leon Ames, Keefe Brasselle, and James Bell as hostages.Thompson had been convicted once of murder, but was declared insane and given a life sentence at an asylum due to the work of psychiatrist Sam Levene.
They have a lot to say to each other during the course of the film.Dial 1119 moves at a pretty good pace and not a minute of its 75 minute running time is wasted.
The lack of really big movie names no doubt helps create the realistic aura of the film.Marshall Thompson usually played good guys and will ever be remembered as Daktari from the television show.
Opponents of capital punishment will not be pleased, but Dial 1119 is still a great noir film..
This sort of plot has been repeated several times in the 1950s with "Suddenly", "The Desperate Hours" and this film, "Dial 1119".The major difference with "Dial 9111" and these other films is that instead of a criminal holding everyone hostage, it's an escaped mental patient--a guy who has no compunction about killing people with his stolen gun.
The bar is made up of a variety of patrons (some of which have interesting back stories--like the creep played by Leon Ames) as well as the amazingly blunt and rude bartender, 'Chuckles' (William Conrad).Once the guy begins shooting people in the bar, there isn't a lot the police can do--he might be insane but he's also smart and has figured all the angles--and police are afraid to do anything lest all the captives be killed.
It stars Marshall Thompson, Virginia Field, Andrea King, William Conrad and Sam Levine.
A compact suspenser, Dial 1119 can be seen as very much a prototype of future thrillers where a hostage situation takes place.
Here the story basically sees Thompson as escaped mental patient Gunther Wyckoff, who takes a bus to Terminal City, grabs hold of a gun and holes up in a bar with a small group of hostages.
Once MGM gave the go-ahead for a sub-department to produce low-budget Film-Noir's they got it right.
Especially the usually ineffective Marshall Thompson as a man without a conscience and is completely fixated internally.The shots of inside the Media truck and the big-screen TV are infiltrations of a yet to be discovered, mammoth intrusion of the Fourth Estate.
So, now the crazy guy is loose in the city, headed for a late night bar sporting that new-fangled invention called television.
Anyway, it's a good, tight little B-film, with the novel idea (for its time) that movies and TV might get along, after all..
Bar patrons held hostage in slice-of-life noir.
In Dial 1119 -- the equivalent of 911 today -- clean-cut Marshall Thompson plays the most whacked-out of the bunch, a cold, disengaged psycho who kills without reaction or remorse.
Riding the Big Dog into town (the aptly named Terminal City), he steals the bus driver's gun and, when confronted, plugs him dead.
Seems he returned to town to meet with the police psychiatrist who knows the "real" story behind his shell-shocked persona....Dial 1119 is an engaging (if never quite gripping) drama, part of MGM's low-budget, black-and-white early 1950s productions under Dore Schary.
Out of the grayness of film noir drama comes a pondering on the gray area of social engineering.
MGM was known for "More stars than there are in Heaven." And therefore few people think of it in terms of film noir.But some of the very best noir came out of that studio in the 1940s and 1950s -- this being one of the bleakest and grittiest.It's kind of a "Grand Hotel" in a sleazy bar.
We have lots of types, but, with the exception of one dear thing on her way to the road to Hell with an older man, they're extremely convincing low lifes.We have a real prostie here, a tough bartender, a couple of guys on the make.The escaped killer is portrayed very brutally, with understanding but no phony-baloney tears.The cast could scarcely be better.
An engaging film despite a thin story line involving a psycho who's taken five hostages in a down-scale local bar.
In Dial 1119, as in so many noir films, the locations, sets, and artifacts, are usually more interesting than the plot line.
For me, the most remarkable feature of this film is the prominent TV set in the bar where most of the action takes place (the sport being watched is pro-wrestling).
The TV though is more than a prop--it often dominates the screen and begins to take on a key role in the film when a TV reporter and camera crew from the cleverly named station WKYL arrive to cover the police rescue action, which is then seen broadcast on the bar TV.
Having just watched this on TCM and after reading the previous reviews for this film all I can say is that although there may be limited moments of great suspense which does not take anything away from the film.The plot- insane man escapes from a mental institution and holds five people hostage in a bar.
Marshall Thompson stars in this interesting thriller as Gunther Wyckoff, a mentally unstable young man who has escaped from an asylum, killed a bus driver with a gun he acquired, then holds a bar hostage with several people inside.
Both the authorities and hostages try to work with and understand why Gunther is so crazed, with little success, though it does have something to do with his war record...
William Conrad is good as the bartender affectionately named Chuckles, who has a most surprising big screen TV in the bar, where they can see their drama play out live.
A man escapes from an asylum and holds people hostage in a bar, as the police try to meet his demands.
Conrad plays "Chuckles" the bartender and he's pretty good, as is the rest of the cast, featuring such reliable veterans as Levene and Ames.
It's 1950, and familiar TV faces abound in "Dial 1119": Marshall Thompson (Daktari), Sam Levene, Keefe Brasselle, William Conrad and Virginia Field.
Thompson plays Gunther Wyckoff, a deeply disturbed man who, after shooting a bus driver with his own gun, walks into a bar and takes the patrons hostage.The police have to figure out how to capture Wyckoff and free the hostages without any other people getting hurt.
They send in the doctor (Levene) whose testimony saved his life during a murder trial three years earlier.It's post-war, so there's some psychoanalyzing of Wyckoff along the way.The bar has a giant television, which is great to see, and the bartender controls it from what looks like a radio below.
This crazy person is played by Marshall Thompson, (Gunther Wyckoff) who is riding in a bus and sitting next to a lady who is trying to be friendly, but Gunther just looks straight ahead and views a gun that the bus driver had on his sun shade and just gets up and blows this driver away.
The studio was undoubtedly hoping that baby-faced Marshall Thompson would be just as ironically chilling playing a killer as Alan Ladd was a few years earlier in "This Gun For Hire".
This story seems to repeat itself over and over again in movies, TV, and real life.An angry war veteran seizes hostages and/or murders innocents, and gains media attention and feedback -- in this movie, by means of telephone and television.(Does the name Christopher Dorner ring a bell?)Perhaps this was one of the first depictions of PTSD.
The theme is the psychological destruction that comes from war, whether involved or rejected from duty, and here, it is the later, surrounding the already demented Marshall Thompson, a young man who believes it is his duty to kill, having wanted so much to do so when World War II came up.Killing a bus driver after he is discovered to have a gun, he then takes over a local bar where a new invention called television is presenting local news as the bartender (William Conrad) grumbles about it.
It is the local news that will soon be camping outside this bar when Thompson orders local police to send doctor Sam Levene there for one last confrontation in exchange for the hostages he has taken.
These are the most memorable of the hostages, the others (including a newspaper man whose own paper ignores his call for help) not as fleshed out.The film makes a few important comments on both the human condition and the issue of violence in society.
In only 75 minutes, the film's gritty and unapologetic violence takes several lives shockingly and seems to be written just to expose the growing violence in society rather than present a plot which is neatly wrapped up like the usual MGM fare.
This psycho rolls into town on a bus and shoots the driver with his own gun for no apparent reason.
He then wanders into a bar full of cast characters, and when his picture appears on tv, he shoots the bartender.
He then holds the bar patrons hostage and notifies the cops with a demand that he wants to see his shrink.
By this time, I wanted to see my shrink.The psycho is played - or should I say underplayed - by Marshall Thompson.
Anyway, the shrink finally talks his way into the bar and takes that high energy opportunity to confront this guy with the news that he was rejected by the draft and invented a story that the military taught him to kill in order to hide his own inadequacies.
Marshall Thompson as an escaped crazed killer and general all-round psycho?
A couple of bursts of hysteria and that's about it.The story takes place in a small, rather cozy bar in Terminal City (get it?) that looks like the Big Apple.
Thompson hold 6 people hostage, (well, really 5 since he guns down the bartender William Conrad right off the bat).
He wants to meet up with his former doctor, played rather badly by Sam Levine, who convinced a jury that Thompson was insane, thereby having him sent to an asylum instead of the gas chamber.
Needless to say, Thompson is ticked off, escapes from the asylum and threatens to kill the bar patrons unless Levine shows up for a face-to-face.
(There are Spoilers) Hostage drama that takes place in this bar with an on the loose psycho killer who just flew the coop from the local state hospital for the criminally insane wanting to see his shrink, psychiatrist, who got him off from being executed for the murder of a policeman three years earlier.The crazed killer Gunther Wyckoff, Marshall Tompson, didn't waste any time in making himself known to the public and police by gunning down a bus driver,John Damler, who's gun that was in full view of everyone on the bus was lifted by Gunther when everyone, including the bus driver, left the bus on a rest stop.
Gunther going to the local bar to dry out only gets even more crazy when the bartender Chuckels, William Conrad,who's only doing his job forces him to have a drink, which he of course doesn't pay for.
Within minutes Gunther completely loses it when he's spotted by Chuckels on the screen of his 3 by 4 foot remote control flat-screen projection TV set broadcasting a police bulletin with his picture, front and side, and then all hell breaks lose.Gunning down Chuckles who tried to pull a gun on him Gunther then takes center stage, and five hostages, in the movie as he calls all the shots, as well as giving them out.Gunther is determined to having a chat with Dr. Faron about his both mental state and military service.
This goes on for what seems like days, it's all supposed to take place in less then a hour, as Gunther terrorizers the customers who are now his hostages.
You can't help wondering why Gunther wants so badly to see Dr. Faron to the point where he already murdered two people to get an audience with him?You know right away that this guy, Gunther Wyckoff, is not only nuts but all his talk about his glorious and macho experiences in the US Army during the war, that he talks endlessly about to his captive audience, is all a pile of horse-sh*t.
It's Dr Faron himself who later, against police orders, makes it into the bar and finally has this important talk with the psycho.
Dr. Faron sets the now really off-the-wall Gunther off and jeopardizing not only his but the lives of all the people in the bar.Interesting but not at all earth-shaking movie about a mentally ill young man, Gunther Wyckoff, who just couldn't get it out of his head that he was a failure at what he loved most in being a blood & guts war hero.
Marshall Thompson breaks out of a hospital for the criminally insane, travels to "Terminal City" and after shooting the bus driver, barges into a saloon and holds the half dozen patrons hostage.
Levene and the cops surrounding this dismal joint believe that Marshall just wants to talk to his former shrink, but he doesn't.
He's come to kill him.So we wait, while Marshall kills the sour bartender who tries to dial 1119 and get the police, while the cops try to sneak a sharpshooter in through an air duct, and while some of the customers go through the varied tribulations familiar to fans of the airplane-in-danger movies.
Sam Levene is always a treat but he's been given a role here -- the police shrink who got Thompson out of the electric chair three years ago by spouting a lot of psychobabble -- that no actor on earth could pull off without sacrificing his dignity.In the lead role, Marshall Thompson plays the madman as if he'd never met one.