cult film freak: CHARLES BRONSON RUSSIAN THROUGH DON SIEGEL'S 'TELEFON'

Charles Bronson in TELEFON Year: 1977 Rating: ***1/2

With a plot-device highly influenced by THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE before and spoofed later in THE NAKED GUN, a string of random telephone calls to ordinary Americans, with a monotone voice reciting a Robert Frost poem to hypnotize each target... from a gas station owner to a charter pilot to a bathrobe-donning housewife... is causing plenty of explosive mayhem to various military installations...

And for a spy movie, Donald Pleasence fits perfectly as the villain: he's the one making those calls and then, from a station wagon, watches the suicide-bombing destruction first hand...

Charles Bronson and Lee Remick in TELEFON

At first it's difficult to tell where this Cold War Thriller is going, especially the following sequence involving Tyne Daley as the original computer geek in a government office... until shifting to Russia where, along with exposition-spouting Generals Alan Badel and Patrick Magee, we finally have our hero... but he's another Russian...

Only Charles Bronson's Maj. Grigori Borzov — given the task to kill Pleasance's rogue Russian agent before he literally ticks off World War III — is also a children's ice hockey coach, so we have to trust him...

Charles Bronson in TELEFON

And much of the picture has Bronson teamed with his own Girl Friday in a precise yet talkative American agent Lee Remick: mainly because of her snarky charm, their chemistry continues even after the exploitation factor of the bombings ware off... there needed a few more of them... and along with the Hitchcock-inspired NORTH BY NORTHWEST road movie aspect, the final twist is — she has to kill Bronson after he kills Pleasence...

Yet when we reach that particular twisty finale, the Don Siegel film has dragged about twenty minutes too long — perhaps if the horribly titled TELEFON (since those "Sleeper Agents" are hypnotized by phone) didn't spend so much time channeling James Bond and stuck to more suspenseful action sequences, both the star, director and their audience would feel a lot more at home.