Boring

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

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.

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.

Alexander Graham Bell came from a family of elocutionists. His grandfather and father were both published on the subject. He trained also to become a teacher, but having a deaf mother, he came to desire more than just teaching.In his early stages of teaching, he begins by teaching a young mute boy (Bobs Watson) while being paid by the father of the boy (Gene Lockhart). The money he earns from this, he uses to work on first the telegraph, then the telephone.The mute boy's father is so pleased with the way his son can communicate using a special alphabet glove,that he introduces Bell to his friend (Charles Coburn) who has 4 daughters, including a daughter who became death after having scarlet fever when she was younger. The father kept speaking of his 'little girl'. Imagine Bells surprise when it turned out to be a grown woman (Loretta Young) who, along with her three sisters, play the roles of the business man's daughters.Mabel (Young) 'fell' for him at first sight as she accidentally runs into him when he is coming to their house, not realizing he is the man her father invited to help her. Thinking this business man is going to be able to help him finance the telegraph, he begins to tell him of his invention until the father says he wants Bell to help his daughter. They can talk of the invention another time.The two fall in love, with Young playing a woman who not only backs Alec's (Bell/Ameche) grand ideas and inventions, but encourages him not to give up hope and occasionally puts her foot down when it comes to him not giving up the idea of inventing the telephone and when Bell later is attacked by a firm who claim he stole their invention and sued Bell.Bell got this news right when it seemed things were going the best for him. Queen Victoria had agreed to wire the castle with the telephone and what the queen did was often imitated throughout the world! Plus Bell finds out he is to be a father. But he also gets a letter from his father in law that a company is suing him for copyright stealing.He determines to return to the States, fight the lawsuit with truth to defend not only his invention, but his father-in-law, his friend, the mute boy's father (both of whom backed him to the hilt on the telephone), his partner in experiments Watson(Henry Fonda) and for all inventors who are poor and have their ideas copyrighted, only to be stolen by those with less scruples and more money.When she hears how badly the trial is going due to lack of evidence, Bell's wife and mother come to the trial. It seems that for lack of available paper, Bell had written a love letter to his dear Mabel on the back of an important bit of evidence that could be the key to him winning the lawsuit and keep he and his partners from being robbed of his invention and going bankrupt.Interestingly, both Lockhart and Coburn also are important players in the story 'Edison, the Man' but with Coburn being the more sympathetic and Lockhart the heavy. In this one Lockhart is usually more sympathetic and Coburn usually more cynical. Both have added beards and mustaches that change the appearance to a degree. This film, I believe, was released first.Yes, it is likely that Hollywood may have embellished the biography a bit and why not? It is an inspiring film that shows that there is much hunger, pain and even delays in being married when someone follows their dream to invent. But it also is often well worth it if the inventor sticks with it. Of course it's no guarantee all stories will turn out as well as this one and, ironically, in "Edison, the Man", Edison also has to defend his invention of electricity in court.Not sure if anyone else caught it, but I think they did make one goof in the film. Towards the end, the mother of Bell's wife (Spring Byington) knocks on the door of the room Bell and his wife are in. I believe Bell may ask who it is, but when the mother says it's mom, Bell's wife (deaf) says 'come in Mom'. Either a clever guess on her part, or an error revealing that she can really hear. Nothing had been said (that I could see...)to show if he was somehow able to help her hear or to give her a clue as to who it was at the door.To the commenter that was deaf and asked about Young's character Mabel being born deaf or becoming it: the father says it was from scarlet fever as a young girl and she was sent to England (I believe) to study how to read lips.Considering that it was 1875-6 that the story was set in and that the film was release only about 10 years into 'talkies', I thought it was quite a good performance on Young's part.An enjoyable movie. Even one that older kids can watch and learn about how what is now so taken for granted (not only telephones that can call across countries and around the world, but mobile phones, phones that can send photos and video as well as voice, etc.), but something that would have been quite impossible without someone to invent it.I hope the incentive to invent things that are beneficial to humanity is never taken away and maybe films like this one will help encourage people to keep trying and to aim for something that will benefit many people as Alexander Graham Bell did.

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).