Phone Booth Scene from “Number Please?” (1920)

The phone booth scene steals the show in the 1920 short film “Number Please?”, starring Harold Lloyd. The film is directed by Hal Roach and Fred C. Newmeyer, and appears to have been filmed at California’s Santa Monica-Ocean Park Beaches. Archive.org’s copy of this film has the phone booth scene starting at about 9:48 (it is completely silent):

The full film at archive.org can be seen here.

“Number Please?” is from way before my time and the interplay between characters and the phone booths is, of course, all in fun. But some of the difficulties Harold Lloyd experienced in simply making an urgent phone call illustrate how laborious it used to be to simply get to a phone and talk to somebody.

Lloyd encounters catty operators, wrong numbers, not having a nickel to make the call, busy signals (or “busy buzzes” as they were sometimes called), and other less likely comedic barriers to getting a chance to make a simple phone call.

My favorite line, with its accompanying graphic, is “What do you expect for a nickel? The White House?”

It’s too bad the film is silent. The X-shaped sequence with five people screaming into their telephones looks like a climactic moment from opera.

The phone booth scene from “Number Please?” is dated but in spirit it reminds me of experiences I had as late the mid 1990s, waiting and waiting for my chance to get at a payphone as tempers flared among the dozen or so others also waiting their turn. The “Payphone Hog” may be gone but to some that figure is never forgotten.