Too much of everything

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Yes it's only a very vague and reminiscent memory from the Summer of 1979 but how I recall best this brief clip in which on Wall Street the display ribbon outside of the building got stuck then when Bell offered to fix it one man told him come back at Christmastime.Then when his boss said "Let him try." He then managed to fix it and then was thanked and Bell said to that other man "Merry Christmas." Then My Mom,My Older Sister and I were Laughing. Yes thus showing how Bell like Edison had many talents beyond the one he was most famous for of which is of course the Telephone.Truly, Stephen "Steve"G.Baer a.k.a."Ste" of Framingham,Ma.

This is a very entertaining biopic of the inventor of the telephone starring the great Don Ameche as the title character, Loretta Young, a very young Henry Fonda and Ameche's "Heaven Can Wait" co-star Charles Coburn, all of whom give excellent performances. Don Ameche is one of my favourite actors. Watching him in a film, whether he's in his 30s or in his 80s, is the cinematic equivalent of wrapping myself in a warm blanket on a cold night. He is like Gregory Peck and Christopher Reeve in that respect.It's fictionalised in parts - for instance since Bell only went to Canada (and later the US) in his 20s, he should really have a Scottish accent - but I think that it's fairly accurate for the most part. Bell's two daughters Elsie - who is depicted in the film as a baby - and Marian were still alive when it was released. I wonder if they saw it and what they thought of it. The film was so popular that "the Ameche" was a widely used slang term for the telephone throughout the 1940s.

I felt compelled to click the "Contains spoiler" box for a story about Alexander Graham Bell, the "spoiler" being that he invented the telephone. What does that tell us about the end of civilization as we know it? Actually, this is an engaging movie, although I believed only certain features of its presentation. Alexander Graham Bell was born. He invented the telephone. He died. Of those points I'm sure. I guess his wife was deaf and Bell himself, a Scot by birth, was preceded by two generations of writers interested in the mechanics of speech and associated pathologies. And we know he had an assistant named Watson, Henry Fonda here, because of that famous first voice transmission -- "Watson, come here. I need you." I'm doubtful that it was caused by Bell's having spilled sulfuric acid on his leg. It's true, too, that the success of the device was boosted when it was adopted in the palace of Queen Victoria, or so I was taught years ago in an anthropology course on culture change and innovation.But all that doesn't amount to much. The film is an entertaining piece of semi-educational family fare. Bell and Watson suffer through hard times together, punctuated by occasional breakthroughs or epiphanies, usually followed by more hard times. As Watson, Henry Fonda adds some necessary common-sensical and often softly funny observations about the lives they're leading. Too bad he more or less disappears from the movie about half way through, like Lear's fool.But it's Boston in 1875 and we see the obsessive Bell making his way through a light snow fall of cornflakes while children throw snowballs at him, a lamplighter lights a lamp, screaming children ride sleds along the sidewalks embanked by fake snow, and horses and carriage jingle their way down the studio streets. There are Christmas carols and mute children who learn to say "father", and Christmas dinners and presents, and a love interest in the appealing form of Loretta Young.There's something winning about these old-fashioned studio productions. In this case, the studio was 20th-Century Fox and the producer was Daryl Zanuck, renowned for his ability to polish a script into a nicely structured, well-written, and thoroughly commercial form, and for being a Goy from Wahoo, Nebraska. I love the fake snow and the teary children and the determined scientist distracted by love and the need for money. Even if you don't believe a word of it, it's still a comforting experience.Don Ameche approaches his role with the innocent hyperbolic enthusiasm of a child. Fonda seems sleepy and is all legs, like young Mister Lincoln. Loretta Young has calf-like eyes and a sweet smile and is so demure that she manages to suggest barely repressed volcanic passions. The supporting cast are mostly familiar -- Charles Coburn, Gene Lockhart, and Spring Byington -- and they turn in professional performances.The climactic courtroom battle is something of a let down. Poor Bell was the victim of innovational inevitability. The telephone was just one example of an endless list of simultaneous discoveries and inventions. I can only think of the gasoline-powered car, oxygen, radar, and the jet engine at the moment. In a way, culture advances in accordance with its own schedule and the inventors and discoverers acclaimed as genius's are its instruments, people who happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right temperament. If I can dig up that list of simultaneous inventions I'll post it on the message board.Anyway, a routine but likable biography from the old studio system, now thoroughly defunct.

Just how factual all the events are in Fox's biographical account of THE STORY OF Alexander GRAHAM BELL, I don't know, but it seems safe to say they have taken the basic outline of his life and embellished it with a series of vignettes that serve to show us how and why he became the inventor of the telephone.Although this is DON AMECHE's signature role (indeed the invention is often referred to as "The Ameche"), he clearly had better roles in his future. Here he overacts to a tiresome degree under Irving Cummings' direction. On the other hand, there's a considerable amount of underplaying by LORETTA YOUNG and HENRY FONDA in subordinate roles. Young is Ameche's deaf wife and Fonda is his laboratory assistant.Factual or not, it moves at a slow pace and may not be the kind of biography for everyone, lacking the vigorous style of a story about Jesse James, for example. There's a little too much talk before we get to the crucial scene in the film where Ameche spills acid and calls for help over the wire to Fonda in the next room.Supporting cast includes GENE LOCKHART, SPRING BYINGTON and CHARLES COBURN (who must have been one of Hollywood's busiest character actors in the '30s and '40s).