Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 17, 1993 TAG: 9307240235
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RON MILLER KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The 1939 "Story of Alexander Graham Bell" left moviegoers with a vivid memory of that historic moment on March 10, 1876, when Ameche as inventor Bell spoke the words, "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you," into the first working telephone and an amazed Henry Fonda, as Thomas Watson, came loping into the room.
The TNT movie, which premieres Sunday at 8 p.m., goes further, reminding us that Bell was so much more than just the fellow who invented a device for teen-agers to talk on for hours. The movie depicts him as a devoted humanitarian who regarded his achievement as a minor part of his contribution to humankind.
Born in mid-19th-century Scotland to Alexander Melville Bell (Ian Bannen), a pioneer in speech studies who specialized in teaching "visible speech" to the deaf, young Bell grew up with a vivid understanding of the importance of sound, mainly from his studied efforts to better communicate with his hearing-impaired mother, Eliza Symonds Bell (Brenda Fricker).
Convinced it was an unnecessary nuisance to speak into a tube so his mother could hear him, Bell studied the mechanics of human speech and the physiology of the ear when he was sent away to college in London.
After his father moved the family across the sea to Brantford, Ontario, Bell landed a job teaching students at the Boston School of the Deaf. An alliance with Gardiner Hubbard of the new Clarke Institution for Deaf Mutes in Boston not only gave Bell a wealthy ally in his belief that deaf people should be taught oral speech rather than sign language, but also gave him the love of his life - Hubbard's daughter, Mabel, who lost her hearing at age 5 after a bout with scarlet fever.
In one of the best scenes in Sunday's episode, Bell (John Bach) wants to make up with the handsome, bright Mabel (Vanessa Vaughan), who has ended their romance because he allowed a stranger to refer to her as "a deaf mute." While talking with Mabel's father, Bell is aware she is eavesdropping by reading his lips. He vows his love for her and tells her father, "I will amend my life for her."
He does indeed, making her the symbol of his life-long labors to improve the lot of hearing-impaired people everywhere and fighting stubbornly for their dignity at all times.
Bach, from New Zealand, makes the inventor a passionate, if iconoclastic, zealot whose utilization of his genius for helping others is his greatest pleasure in life.
Vaughan gives an affecting performance as the young Mabel, and British actress Elizabeth Quinn plays the older Mabel superbly. Both are hearing-impaired in real life but tackle this difficult role, which requires speaking great chunks of dialogue on numerous occasions, with a special vigor. Their Mabel Bell is fiercely independent, but the most serenely loving of women.
Though the film painstakingly recreates all of Bell's central experiments in the development of the telephone - including, of course, the immortal sequence with Watson (Francis Bell) - it gives nearly equal time and detail to some of his many other achievements: the invention of the phonograph (the Bell patents were sold to Thomas Edison); his flirtation with the "vacuum jacket," forerunner to the iron lung; his early work in sonar; his role as a founder of the National Geographic Society; his development of a rival flying machine in competition with the Wright brothers, and his building of the world's fastest hydrofoil racing boat.
In one fascinating segment, we see Bell called in to help locate an assassin's bullet inside the body of the dying President James Garfield (Ian Watkin), using his untested electromagnetic metal-detecting device. Impatient aides rushed Garfield to the hospital, where he died, before Bell discovered the metal springs in the president's mattress were blunting the effectiveness of his device.
The film also details Bell's long, destructive series of legal battles with Western Union over the telephone patents. Ultimately, there were some 600 lawsuits that occupied 18 years before Bell finally won.
In another beautiful sequence in Part 2 (Monday night at 8), Bell nearly sends away a man who comes to see him without an appointment, but relents when he learns the man is trying to find help for his deaf, mute and blind daughter. She turns out to be the very young Helen Keller. Bell puts her family in touch with the right people, who bring Keller and her brilliant teacher, Anne Sullivan, together. Bell and Keller remained lifelong friends.
"The Sound and the Silence" was a labor of love for director and co-writer John Kent Harrison, who spared nothing in his efforts to make his film as authentic as possible. Given complete access to Bell's papers, he even arranged to film most of the second episode at the Bell estate at Baddeck in Nova Scotia.
The result is the sometimes slow, sometimes episodic, but always breathtakingly real story of a genuinely legendary man - a genius who might find his inspiration while floating nude on his back in an icy lake, smoking a cigar in a rainstorm, or awakening at 4 a.m. at age 73 to work out, in the lab, a technical problem that was denying him sleep.
As for the invention of the telephone, Bell seemed to have put it into perspective long before his death at 74 in 1922.
In the film's most delightful scene, Bell gets an unsolicited phone call from someone trying to sell him a Sears & Roebuck catalog and, in his anger at the disturbance to his train of thought, throws the blasted contraption right out his window, completely unmindful of who was responsible for that pesky call and millions more to come.
by CNB