Phone Call from a Stranger (1952)

Directed by Jean Negulesco; screenplay by Nunnally Johnson

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When the father in the parable welcomed back home the wayward son, we are told that he kissed the boy and bade his servants slaughter the fatted calf, because “this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and he is found.” We aren’t told what life was like for him all that time when the boy was gone, and when he had, in the living he had divided in half, a daily reminder of the son’s ingratitude. For when the son said, “Give me the portion of your living that is coming to me,” it was as much as to say to the father, “I wish you were dead.” The father had to be patient in the full sense that I’ve suggested in our Word of the Week. Patience is more than drumming your fingers on the desk while you check the time. It is endurance in suffering, and the worst things to suffer aren’t physical but moral and spiritual. King Lear, in our Poem of the Week, begged for patience, but he’s still vowing vengeance against his ungrateful daughters. By the end of the play, he will no longer do so, and not because he’s grown soft-hearted. He has become kingly at last. Only suffering in patience could have brought him to that noble height, which makes his death in the end more tragic but also more capable of stirring us to wonder and awe.

Something like that is the moral import of our Film of the Week, Phone Call from a Stranger. It is an unusual plot, telling us four stories at once and then consecutively, by conversation and flashbacks. Each of the stories calls for forgiveness born of patience: not a sentimental thing, not a shrug at wrongdoing, but real forgiveness, real patience, as we are led to understand what might make otherwise ordinary people do bad things, or what depth of humanity might lie beneath an unpromising exterior. David Trask (Gary Merrill), the central figure in the film, has left his wife and family when he learns that she has had an affair with another man. She begs him not to go, but he boards an airplane and seems eager to cut himself off from her for good. On that airplane he meets three people, each of whom has a story to tell. They are as unlike as it is possible for three people to be. One of them, a traveling salesman named Eddie (Keenan Wynn), can do nothing but tell loud jokes in bad taste, and to boast about his beautiful wife, whose picture in a bathing suit he passes around. Another is a young actress on the make (Shelley Winters), whose mother-in-law hates her, resenting her youth, and working always to divide her from her husband, whom she rules with an iron will. The mother-in-law herself was a big name on the vaudeville circuit, but those days are past. The third is a doctor addicted to drink (Michael Rennie), who was responsible for a car accident in which his friend and fellow doctor was killed; he and his wife (Beatrice Straight, in her inaugural role on the screen) have hidden the truth from their son, who blames her for his father’s alcoholism. The doctor is going home to tell his son the truth — and to tell it to the district attorney, too. All this can’t be told by people shouting at each other over the noise of an airplane’s engines, but the weather is terrible, forcing the plane to touch down for several hours at an intermediate airport. That gives these four people plenty of opportunity to talk, and they even exchange phone numbers and addresses, planning to get together after a while and renew their acquaintance.

But that will not happen. The plane takes off again, but the storm grows worse, and in the ensuing crash only a few people survive. The only one of the four friends to live, though badly banged up, is Trask. He knows that each one of them had something to say, and so he determines to visit their loved ones in turn. He is the Stranger of the title. He is the Stranger with a message; an odd sort of Stranger, because in a way he knows something quite private about the three deceased passengers, and he comes to reveal it, to heal a couple of old and festering wounds, and, in the case of the salesman, to tell his widow how much the loudmouthed fellow loved her.

I think I can reveal one of the surprises in store. The salesman’s wife turns out not to be the bathing beauty in the picture. The actress is Bette Davis, a consummate professional, who gave her all to every role, no matter how small; and her scene with Gary Merrill — her real-life husband — is the most powerful one in the film, and its climax. Eddie the salesman indeed loved her; and she knew it; knew it better than anyone could know it, because it was she who had wronged him. The tables are turned — and Trask, who thought that he was playing the surgeon to others, learns to his speechless amazement that it is his flesh that the scalpel is probing.

Nunnally Johnson, the man who worked a novel by the same name into the screenplay for Phone Call from a Stranger, was one of Hollywood’s greatest writers. He had a very long, busy, and distinguished career, as a writer and a producer, and occasionally as a director. We have recently featured one of his works, The Mudlark. I promise to feature several others that I admire greatly, including The Keys of the Kingdom and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, both of which show Gregory Peck at his best, as a man trying to do the right thing in circumstances designed to make no one very happy; but you must do the right thing anyway. What kind of life Johnson himself led, I don’t know; Hollywood didn’t reward either patience or forgiveness. But it still recognized them, and that’s something. If we would be forgiven, we must forgive — and everybody has a lot to be forgiven, right? Right.

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