Popular reviews

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  Review by Mandrakegray ★★★★½ 5

  Damn...this lean, tense, darkly witty noir knocked me out. I'm a sucker for low budget but still well made crime and mystery dramas of the 40's and 50's, and this crackerjack little gem joins the likes of "Split Second" and "Murder By Contract" as my favorite minimalist thrillers of the era.

  Directed by Gerald Mayer, the film is clearly (and cleverly) shot on basically one street corner of MGM's backlot, and mainly within one set of a snazzy little cocktail lounge called "The Oasis Bar". (Here's a 1950 release with a barroom sporting a brand new 3 by 4 foot big screen TV! It's a constant talking point.) A criminally insane young man escapes from a mental institution and holes…

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  Review by theironcupcake ★★½

  Dial 1119 is approximately half of a great film, offering a chilling central performance by Marshall Thompson as a mentally ill man who escapes from a hospital and holds a bar's patrons hostage, the drama also contemplating some potentially compelling ideas about the role of mass media (in this case, early television) to exploit tragedies, but the material is handled inconsistently by director Gerald Mayer (nephew of MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer), who did far stronger work on the later film Bright Road (1953) with Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte. For every effective scene in Dial, like Gunther Wyckoff's (Thompson) coldblooded murder of a Greyhound bus driver or the tension of wondering whether bartender Chuckles (William Conrad) will be…

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  Review by RetroHound ★★★ 1

  Brute force wins out over psychology.

  A guy has escaped a home for the criminally insane. He winds up in a bar holding 5 people hostage. He wants to talk to the psychologist who kept him from the electric chair. Each of the people has a story and none wants to die, but if the psychologist doesn't show in 25 minutes he will kill everyone inside the bar.

  Not a bad hostage drama. It has some similarity with other films that have a circus atmosphere around a news story. Also, there is a big screen TV in the bar. In 1950!

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  Review by Leavingfilmstrk ★★★½ 2

  I really liked this. Low-budget MGM noir directed by Louis B. Mayer's nephew and written by actor/writer Don McGuire. It looks great, dark and noirish, shot by Paul Vogel.

  The story is simple: Marshall Thompson, who is very good, plays an escapee from a hospital who kills indiscriminately and takes hostages inside a bar. It's lean, atmospheric, suspenseful and nothing corny about it.

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  Review by John S. ★★★ 2

  Archetypes galore in this innovative hostage horror from MGM. It’s not a crash-landed alien with a third eye who stirs things up in an enclosed space but a disturbed and escaped killer who has returned to Terminal City. The guy’s a little more aimless than, say, Michael Myers, but after dropping one soul he hits a bar full of characters chewing it out even before our antagonist gets stingy with their freedom. An older, married guy is hitting on a young woman armed with annoyingly innocent deflections. Run away, guy. Run away. But she should run, too. Pretty much everyone in the establishment sucks.

  Once the gun is brought out in public and turned on the patrons, the selfishness of…

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  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★ 1

  "[Boxers] illustrate the society in which we live. We're all boxers; we all beat each other's brains out."

  A man escapes from a mental hospital, steals a gun from a bus, and holds up a bar full of people in order to play out a delusional postwar fantasy.

  This is a mostly one-location, real-time, minimalist noir with a tight plot, languid pace, and focus on character that gives it an almost theatrical feel and makes it very easy and fun to watch, and for its trim 75-minute runtime you'd be hard-pressed to find something that's more economical outside of Hitchcock's Rope. Well worth the small investment it demands.

  We spend just enough time with each patron in the bar to…

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  Review by Xebeche ★★★★ 6

  Escaped killer Gunther Wyckoff takes hostages in a barroom. He demands to speak to the doctor who had him declared insane. Low budget, single set studio pictures from the 40's and 50's are pretty charming because you get to see talent and creativity shining through limited resources. What you have in Dial 1119 is a solid contract ensemble, a taught and idiosyncratic script, and some very cool sound design. It's clean and brisk with a real-time feel that's remeniscent of Robert Wise's The Set-up. There's even a good twist. You could do a lot worse for an afternoon thriller.

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  Review by Johnny Pomatto ★★★★

  What a picture! This sorta B-noir has a title that I had always heard referenced here and there but never knew much about. I noted its short runtime as a value point for watching it before bedtime, and I was enjoying it just fine at first. It mostly takes place in one room and feels like the kind of bottle episode that was bridging the gap between what would have once been a radio drama but now hit that sweet spot of being a feature film just before the boom of television (more on that later) where this otherwise would have been shot on the cheap for something like "Playhouse 90." But there's a lot more craft to the presentation…

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  Review by anne_f_ ★★★½

  Gunther (Marshall Thompson) has just escaped from an asylum for the criminally insane and is looking for the psychiatrist (Sam Levene) whose testimony meant he wasn't executed for the crimes he had committed. He ends up in a bar and takes the people inside hostage. The police basically want him dead so that he cannot kill anyone else, the psychiatrist wants to talk to him so that he can go back to hospital.
  An interesting film that would have been better if it had been longer so that we got to know everyone a bit better - they were merely caricatures. The exchanges between the police and psychiatrist echoed what a lot of people thought, and still think, about the mentally ill, most of who are only a danger to themselves unlike Thompson's character here.

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  Review by Maxvayne ★★★½

  Predates and anticipates emergency phone numbers in the USA (starting in 1958, then police emergency lines in 1968) with the close-to number of '1119', plus not only televisions in Bars - but flatscreen television in bars! Wild stuff.

  Gerald Mayer(nephew of Louis B. Mayer)'s Dial 1119 is more of a breezy entertaining thrill-ride than a top-tier brooding pot-boiler and that's absolutely okay. Here we're mainly stuck in a bar (as some of us would like to be) as deranged escaped mental patient Gunther Wyckoff (Marshall Thompson) takes over the bar full of people at gun point as the police are surrounding outside. Thompson delivers a good performance that's more quietly unraveling with violent spurts than constant loud raving lunatic. Either…

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  Review by PUNQ ★★★

  There was an aura about this psycho out on the town, but there was also a lot of dead time in between the brief extremes. The characters in the bar was mostly pointless too, specially when you consider how much screen time was dedicated to introduce them to the story, when they had so little to do with it. It was basically all about Marshall Thompson and what would make him snap. And those portions was great!

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  Review by John Tandlich ★★★½

  An escaped mental patient takes five patrons in a bar hostage and wants to talk to the psychiatrist who had him committed. A tense, low budget psychological that benefits from using only a few sets and some great black and white photography by noir cinematographer Paul Vogel. Great ensemble cast including Andrea King, Leon Ames and William Conrad before he fattened up and became TV's Cannon). Best performances were by Marshall Thompson as the protagonist and Virginia Field as the floozy.