In movies, mobile phones mysteriously clap out when you need them most, most often when you're about to be dismembered by a madman. Donald Clarkelooks at how Hollywood has adapted to cellphone technology
IN The Wind Will Carry Us, a characteristically enigmatic film from the Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, the protagonist, an engineer, encounters communication difficulties while visiting a remote Kurdish village. The frustrated urbanite's desperate attempts to secure mobile phone reception - an elevated point in the graveyard will just about do - is, this being a Kiarostami picture, probably supposed to encourage us to consider the pettiness of modern life. Viewers could, however, be forgiven for expecting werewolves to jump from the bushes and tear the unfortunate fellow limb from limb.
Over the last decade or so a new convention has emerged in the horror film: when the heroes approach a source of impending execution, their mobile phones will all miraculously drop their connections. This week alone, two separate sets of young folk - those in The Hitcherand Paradise Lost- find themselves rendered incommunicado just before sections of their innards get scattered about the foliage.
The invention of the cellular telephone should have been a great inconvenience for the film industry. Cast a glance along the DVD shelf and you will encounter dozens of films whose denouements would have been ruined if one character could, from a remote source, have alerted another to some impending catastrophe or altered circumstance. Woody Allen could have saved himself that panting dash to stop Mariel Hemingway leaving New York at the end of Manhattan.
If Grace Kelly had her phone on vibrate, Jimmy Stewart could have alerted her to the worrying advance of Raymond Burr in Rear Window.
And, of course, any number of young fools could have summoned the police to the site of their impending beheading.
A pessimist might have predicted an end to the thriller. It was not to be. Shameless scriptwriters merely set to work on misrepresenting the availability of phone services in areas abutting old dark houses or alien landings.
Indeed, the mobile phone offered writers new opportunities for narrative reversals. A key moment in the cinematic history of these devices comes with the opening scene of Wes Craven's Scream. After enduring some minutes of taunting by a psychopath on the telephone, Drew Barrymore is shocked to discover that the nutter is actually lurking outside her house with one of these new portable gizmos. No film-maker would bother with such a supposed twist today. But, as recently as 1996, when Screamoozed into cinemas, if we saw anybody other than Gordon Gekko on the phone we generally assumed they were speaking to somebody on a landline.
Since then, mobile phones have allowed entry to digital realms in the Matrix pictures. They have become haunted in the Korean thriller Phone. And they have enabled delightful lunacy from a detained Kim Basinger in Cellular. The hand-held telephone, which can be used while driving over cliffs or while shooting at Jean-Claude Van Damme, has now become integrated into the drama in a way its bulkier ancestor never quite managed.
In the past, screenwriters, quite understandably, did everything possible to avoid having their characters chat on the phone. What could be more boring than cutting from one living room to another? Doris Day and Rock Hudson, sharing a split-screen in Pillow Talk, were an absolute hoot, but such an approach can appear arch if overused.
Still, the phone and the cinema, invented within a decade of one another, have remained manacled together throughout their respective histories. Apart from anything else, the unavoidable suddenness of a ringing receiver can be used to ram a new energy into the drama.
Think of the blaringly loud phone that surprises Father Karras as he is listening to tapes of Regan in The Exorcist. William Friedkin, the picture's notoriously eccentric director, unexpectedly discharged a revolver to get the right reaction from Jason Miller. Need he have bothered? The ear-burstingly heightened sound of the ring on the soundtrack is alarming enough in itself.
In Italy, before the last war, an entire cinematic movement was named after one class of Alexander Graham Bell's most popular invention.
The so-called White Telephone films, much derided by later neo-realists, featured complacent posh ladies chattering to one another about everything other than the rise of Mussolini.
But, for all the ubiquity of phones, there have been very few pictures that have dared to allow their characters to talk at any great length on the appliance. The one great, gleaming exception is, perhaps, Alan J Pakula's All The President's Men. Acknowledging the fact that most of a journalist's work is done sitting on his her bum, Pakula invites Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman to do little else but chat away on the blower. The film is one of the most gripping of the 1970s and - dare one say it - would have been no more so if the boys had been able to drive, sprint and ski while chatting.
Bring back the landline, producers. Just remember what Rachel Ward said in Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid: "You know how to phone, don't you? You just put your finger in the dial and make tiny little circles."
Hello, Operator! Five great phone moments
DIAL M FOR MURDER (1954)
Evil Ray Milland listens as his wife is strangled on the other end of the phone. Or so he thinks.
PILLOW TALK (1959)
Doris Day and Rock Hudson, rendered in split-screen, squabble about their shared line in one of Hollywood's most underrated comedies.
BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974)
The call is coming from within the house! The birth of a convention in the telephoning maniac school of schlock (above).
SCREAM (1996)
"Do you like scary movies?" Through a clever variation of the above, the mobile comes of age as a tool for the propagation of horror.
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005)
Anne Hathaway's performance - in tight close-up, lipstick flaking - as she delivers unconvincing lies about a violent death stands as a little masterpiece of phone acting.
