Weirdhouse Cinema: The Telephone Box

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss the award-winning 1972 Spanish short film “La cabina,” directed by Antonio Mercero, written by José Luis Garci
and starring José Luis López Vázquez.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (00:12):
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And
last week on Weird House Cinema we talked about the
nineteen eighty four fantasy short film Quest, directed by Saul
and Elaine Bass, and that was a real good time.
If you haven't heard that episode yet, I recommend you
go back and check that out. But this week I
kind of wanted to stick to the theme of short films,

(00:34):
especially weird short films. In the thirty minute run time zone,
that's about how long Quest was. So today we're going
to be talking about a picture that I've had on
my list for a while, the surreal genre Defying nineteen
seventy two made for TV Spanish short film La Cabina
or The Telephone Box, directed by Antonio Mrcero. Now, much

(00:58):
like Quest, The telephone Box you can really do in
a one sentence plot description. It is very light on
plot machinations, not a lot of dialogue, not a lot
of information to process except for weird little images and
things to kind of wonder how you should read as
the situation develops, but instead of a plot per se,

(01:21):
this movie really does have more of a situation, and
that situation is a man gets stuck inside a telephone
booth and he can't get out. And warning, before we
say anything else, this movie does have some major twists
and surprises, and we're going to be talking about all
of that. So if you want to watch it unspoiled,
you should pause here and go do that. The film

(01:42):
is available to stream for free online, including in what
looks to me like an official upload on YouTube by
the television station that owns the rights to it, which
I think is RTVE out of Spain.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
Yeah, yeah, RTV Archivo. That's how I watched it. And
outside of that, I'm not aware of an actual physical
release for this film, though of course sometimes short films
like these do get included as extras on the release
of full features, but this seems to be the best,
if not only, way to watch it right now, at

(02:16):
least internationally.

Speaker 3 (02:18):
So again, the situation that takes place in this film
is a man gets stuck in a telephone box and
he can't get out. Now, what's really interesting about this
story is the way the situation develops, both in terms
of tone, and I would say, ultimately in terms of genre.
I said at the top this was a genre defying film,

(02:40):
and I think you could quite reasonably ask how one
would classify it if you were going to have to
shelve it at the video store. Where does this go?
I've seen write ups that do classify it as a
comedy and write ups that classify it as horror. I
think it's a lot easier to say it is horror
if you had to pick one, but a lot of
writing about this notes that it is both. And while

(03:04):
I think it certainly is both, I think it would
be quite misleading to call Lacabina a horror comedy. That
would give the wrong impression, because horror comedy is a
well established hybrid genre. But in thinking about this question
of what to call Lacabina, I realized that almost all
so called horror comedy movies are built the same way,

(03:27):
and that is, the bones are horror and the flesh
is comedy. So in a horror comedy movie, the plot,
the setting, the characters, and situations will almost entirely be
those of the horror genre. And then what makes it
a comedy is that we get ironic reversals on the

(03:47):
expected imagery or tone, maybe through dialogue or the behavior
of the characters. You will get changes that twist the
basic horror situation and make it funny. When I make
a mental list of horror comedy movies, I think this
basic format applies to all of them, all the ones
I can think of Evil Dead, to Grimlins, Grimlins to

(04:10):
Sean of the Dead, Cabin in the Woods, etc. It's
really hard to think of a movie that people think
of as horror comedy that doesn't basically work like that,
built like a horror film, but then furnished and decorated
with comedy.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
I think Trimmor's is a great example of this. Tremors
is a film that doesn't do anything in its structure
and plot that really screams comedy, but the characters are
fun and funny yes at times, and therefore you get
plenty of chuckles in there, and you can, I think,
accurately call it a horror comedy to some degree.

Speaker 3 (04:42):
I think that's a great example, and I think there's
a reason that horror comedies are usually built like this.
Comedy by nature works by subverting expectations. So I think
the laugh moment in a comedy routine comes from your
brain recognizing some kind of incongruity. I think that's not
how that works, or that's not what's supposed to happen,

(05:03):
or that's not the right way to respond, and so forth.
So when you merge comedy with another genre of storytelling,
the script to follow is pretty clear. You change or
subvert the expectations of that other genre in amusing ways.
So maybe you play with the tone like it's a
horror situation, but the moment, the moment where things would

(05:25):
normally be very serious, something silly happens. Or maybe you
satirize the genre itself, like you invert horror tropes in
a way that reveals something about the reason that writers
invoke them, which undercuts their power. So in you know,
this is what you get more of in movies that
are satires on horror itself, like Happin in the Woods.

(05:47):
So I think that's the way it almost always works.
The other element in the genre hybrid, be it horror
or fantasy or whatever, is the setup, and then the
comedy is by its very nature. The twist on that.
The short film we're going to be talking about today
is I would argue the extremely rare inverse of this

(06:07):
blueprint in lack of beina, the bones are comedy and
the flesh is horror.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
Yeah. I think that is a very valid point. Yeah,
because everything about the premise even just screams comedy. You
hear it and you're like, all right, I'm ready to
hear this joke. You don't know that the joke's punchline
is going to be so bleak and horror centric. But
it initially seems to have the structure of comedy, the

(06:34):
structure of.

Speaker 3 (06:34):
A joke exactly right. So it's a comedy situation. In fact,
we could explore more about this as we go on,
but it feels to me like a very old, classic,
almost silent film era style of comedy situation. It makes
me think of Charlie Chaplin.

Speaker 2 (06:50):
Oh absolutely, yeah, it's very mind too, of course, like this,
the mind act is oh, I'm stuck in a box,
and that's the basic plot here. Yeah. In fact, I
believe the filmmakers when they were casting it, initially one
of them was pushing for them hiring a mind like
let's get somebody who can who can do that level

(07:10):
of wordless pure body acting.

Speaker 3 (07:14):
And the main actor that is cast in the film
is the guy who gets stuck in the box does
have a lot of mimelike skills. So the setup of
the plot is an absurd, humiliating physical situation where there's
like a mechanical problem to solve. Again, this is like
a Charlie Chaplin scene. So you're stuck in a box
and we watch various stereotyped characters come along and try

(07:37):
and fail to solve the problem in amusing ways. However,
if this movie had just been a comedy that delivered
on that premise, I don't think it would be all
that well remembered. Not like the comedy elements are not good,
but it just wouldn't stand out in the way that
it actually does. This movie made a big impression on
a lot of people. We can talk more about its

(07:57):
cultural impact in a bit, but I think it is
the horror twist that really makes this movie memorable to
people and is what makes it kind of masterful. So
as the comedy scenario drags on, there is a very gradual,
almost imperceptibly increasing tone of menace and despair, and moment

(08:18):
by moment, the situation just becomes less funny and a
little weirder. And more ominous, until by the final moments
we are in full throttle nightmare territory. And I honestly
cannot think of another film that pulls off this kind
of revolution in genre and tone across its run time.
It's a really interesting project, has a very unique effect

(08:42):
on the viewer, and I can't think of anything else
quite like it.

Speaker 2 (08:45):
The only picture that's coming to my mind that does
something even kind of like this is Terry Gilliams Brazil
with of course it's actual ending, not the fairy tale ending,
but the right bleak ending that that we get in
that picture, which is one of the things that makes
it so memorable. Like there's so much in Brazil that is,

(09:07):
you know, stupid and absurd and outright comedic, but we
land in a very dark place, in a very contemplative place,
and I think it's one of the reasons that Brazil
resonates so strongly with everyone.

Speaker 3 (09:20):
I think that's a really good point of comparison, though
I would say it's different because I think the bleak
and ominous stuff is there from the beginning in Brazil,
but throughout the runtime it's also like earlier on especially,
it's a lot funnier, and then it just ends in
like its bleakest point, whereas this is a movie that
starts it's not scary or bleak at all at the beginning.

(09:42):
It starts off completely lighthearted and then ends where it does.

Speaker 2 (09:46):
Now we've mentioned absurdity a couple of times, and I
think absurdity is also key to understanding The Telephone Box.
I think it makes wonderful use of absurdity in multiple ways,
and I think we are generally primed to in interpret
absurdity in terms of comedy, at least at first. Maybe
there's some sort of scenario though, where if absurdity, if

(10:07):
you're continually bombarded with absurdity, it eventually becomes horror. I'm
not sure, but I think one of the film's great
merits is that on the whole as even though we
have an absurd premise, from the get go, it's pretty
much played straight. We have some goofy moments, some physical comedy,
but even those goofier moments I think are played with

(10:28):
a realistic air and deliberately avoid going full cartoon on anything.
And we'll touch on some examples of this when we
get into the plot later, and then of course at
the center of it all, our unfortunate man, our gray
man trapped in the phone booth played by Jose Lewis
Lopez Vsquez, who we'll get to here in a minute,
is portrayed just very believable, very relatable. It has this

(10:51):
quiet dignity and frustration and embarrassment that just steadily gives
way to these darker emotional states.

Speaker 3 (10:58):
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right, And I think I'm
not the first to point this out. You know, people
have written before about the kind of surprising overlap between
comedy and horror and the way I think they can
both stem from absurd situations that you know, the genres
do have a lot in common, Like they both deal
with the with the building and then the release of tension.

(11:18):
That's the structure of a joke, and that's the structure
of a scare in a horror movie. And as you
were just pointing out, with like the situational absurdity in
the film, a lot of times the difference but like
the same events could be shown as comedy or as horror,
And really all that it takes to make a difference
between the two is your perspective.

Speaker 2 (11:39):
Yeah, absolutely, So.

Speaker 3 (11:41):
Another thing I wanted to bring up about Lacabino or
the telephone Box is that this is not an obscurer movie.
Actually certainly not obscure within Spain. You know, we on
a weird House. We cover stuff most people have never
heard of, and we cover stuff that's pretty well known.
This is actually sort of both because I think many
English speaking listeners will probably never heard of it. But

(12:04):
in Spain, I think lots of people saw this on TV,
certainly back when it came out. Lots of people who
are adults now saw it on TV when they were kids,
having no idea what it was, and it left a
powerful impression on them. This is one of those movies
where there's like a lot of Internet search traffic of
people asking what was the horror movie where the guy

(12:25):
gets stuck in a phone box? And then they come
across this and find these web pages about it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:31):
I think, as we've discussed before, that's one of the
brilliant things about broadcast horror television is that so many
of us watched something or part of something and it
just stuck in our heads and we had no idea
what it was. And it's only much later via the
Internet that were able to find out. Oh yeah, I was,
that's what it was. It was in my case like Nasaka,
it was Nasica or various horror movies that I saw

(12:53):
parts of.

Speaker 3 (12:54):
We may have mentioned this on the show before, but
I remember having a conversation with my dad about this
where he was remember from when he was a kid
seeing something on TV that really scared him, and just
talking through it, we were able to figure out what
it was, and it was an episode of Boris Karloff's
thriller that was an adaptation of the story Pigeons from Hell.
Oh yes, yes, the short story by Robert E. Howard.

(13:18):
But anyway, coming back to the telephone box, something quite
interesting about this was that it was something of a
cultural sensation. It was kind of the talk of the
town in Spain when it first aired in December nineteen
seventy two, and I was reading an article about this
movie called Lacabina Creating Horror from the Absurd. This was

(13:38):
published in an online magazine called The Artifice, written by
a contributor just called Amius. I guess that's like a
pseudonym or something. But in this article, which is definitely
worth a read for a lot of the background on
the film. The author talks about how the movie gave
rise to so it was not only talked about a lot,
it gave rise to a kind of urban legend in Madrid. Basically,

(14:00):
I think the idea was that people in Madrid were
becoming trapped in phone boxes and later being kidnapped by
sort of agents in shadowy uniforms, and nobody knew where
they were taken, and so this actually would cause people
to be afraid. And maybe whether or not they'd actually
seen this short on TV, maybe they just heard about
the kind of rumor of this thing happening secondhand, and

(14:23):
so they go into a phone box to make a
call and leave their legs sticking out to keep the
door from shutting.

Speaker 2 (14:29):
I love that they made phone boxes scary, which we should.
This would probably is probably a good point in the
podcast to mention for our younger listeners high zoomers. A
phone box or a telephone booth is a is a compartment,
sometimes open on one or more sides, but sometimes it

(14:50):
can be sealed with a door, and there is a
pay telephone in there, a telephone that you would put
money into in order to place calls and could receive
calls if you've watched enough older films, especially like noir films,
you know, payphones off and feature into the plot. So
I'm half joking and having to remind everyone what it is.
But I also found it an interesting experience to watch

(15:13):
this film that is so centered around a phone booth
and really asking myself, have I ever actually used one
in my life? And I'm not sure that I have
ever used a fully enclosed phone booth before.

Speaker 3 (15:26):
Yeah, I'm not sure I've used payphones when I was younger,
but I don't know if they were ever the kind
that were enclosed in a glass box.

Speaker 2 (15:33):
Yeah, there is something just unique about the idea that
I must seal myself into this space in order to
then have this disembodied conversation with another place. There's almost
kind of a magic act going on there, which I
think they're tapping into a little bit here.

Speaker 3 (15:48):
Well, you want privacy for your call, but I mean,
does it feel private when everybody can see you from
all sides?

Speaker 2 (15:55):
I don't know. I mean I nowadays with everyone. I mean,
it seems like this was a national expectation for folks.
People are gonna have phone calls out in public. They
want privacy, but now we know they don't really want privacy.
People have all sorts of hyper sensitive phone calls out
in front of tons of people. So it turns out
it really didn't matter.

Speaker 3 (16:16):
Okay, I got another bizarre cultural legacy of this movie.
Also mentioned in that same article on the Artifice, in
what seems to me like a quite bizarre marketing choice,
there's a Spanish telecom company called Telefonica which actually released
TV ads after this special that were a parody of it,

(16:39):
using the star of the movie in the ads. That
will seem even more bizarre to you after we discuss
the whole plot.

Speaker 2 (16:47):
Yeah, as that Artifice article kind of gets into, it's
really kind of brilliant. It's like, uh oh, they've made
telephone booth scary. What do we do? We embrace it,
We turn it into a commercial. Even though from angles
that seems a little tone deaf, it actually reminds me
of some of the Severance branded ads out there right
now for stuff like zip Recruiter, where they're just like, Yep, Severance,

(17:10):
that's great, let's attach our brand to that. When Severance
is in many ways like a really cutting look at
workplace culture and and you know what it does to
us and what we do to ourselves there.

Speaker 3 (17:22):
So I'm a surfboard company. Let's make a Jaws themed commercial.

Speaker 2 (17:27):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know, But then again, I guess
any publicity is good publicity, so they go for it.

Speaker 3 (17:32):
Now. Actually, the story of the ad for this telephone
company gets even stranger because that article talks about how
the movie itself, the short film may have been in
part inspired by a telephone company ad that aired in
the nineteen sixties and also had the star of this
film in it. So, so there was a phone ad,

(17:54):
and then the guy from the phone ad was in
a movie that turned a telephone box into horror, and
then the telephone company made another ad that was a
spin off of the horror movie.

Speaker 2 (18:04):
Right, And I think there's also some possible connection to
a nineteen sixty spy movie that had somebody in a
phone booth in the phone booth gets put on the
back of a truck, that kind of thing. But the
ultimate finished product here goes in original and terrifying directions.

Speaker 3 (18:20):
Yeah. Also this in the not obscure category. This movie
won awards. It won an International Emmy in nineteen seventy
three for Best Fiction. This was apparently the first Emmy
ever for a Spanish director.

Speaker 2 (18:32):
Yeah, and as we'll get into, many of the people
involved in this picture were top notch professionals who were
recognized certainly within Spain but also internationally.

Speaker 3 (18:43):
Yeah, so major cultural legacy. There's some kind of there was,
at least at some point a kind of campaign to
get a monument put in place that's like a phone box,
you know, in Madrid, to recognize this movie. There's like
telephone booth graffiti that people have found for somebody like
illustrates the man from the movie being trapped on the

(19:03):
inside of a phone booth.

Speaker 2 (19:04):
Yeah, and it's rather telling. The article points out that
Charlie Brooker of Black Mirror fame was inspired by this
short film, which should tell you everything you need to
know about the ultimate trajectory of this piece.

Speaker 3 (19:19):
This is very nineteen seventy two Black Mirror. Okay. Now,
we would normally play some trailer audio here, but I
don't think this thing ever had a trailer, at least
as far as I can tell.

Speaker 2 (19:29):
Not that I could tell. So in a lieu of
a trailer, go watch it. Just go watch it and
come back, or if you know you're not going to
watch it, or you don't like to go into films
without full spoilers, then carry on and watch it later. Joe,
what's your elevator pitch?

Speaker 3 (19:44):
Here? Well, if the tagline for Jaws was You'll never
go in the water again, this is gotta be You'll
never go in a phone booth again. Right.

Speaker 2 (19:52):
I think that works. I think that works.

Speaker 3 (20:02):
All right? We talk about the connections.

Speaker 2 (20:05):
Yes, So let's start at the top with the director
who also has a writing credit on this. As we
mentioned earlier, it is Antonio Marcero or Marciro. I'm not
sure which pronunciation is most accurate here, but he lived
nineteen thirty six through twenty eighteen Spanish film and TV

(20:26):
director whose work was well regarded domestically and internationally. His
directorial work spanned from nineteen sixty through two thousand and
seven and included such acclaimed films as nineteen eighty eight's
Wait for Me in Heaven, about a man selected against
his will to serve as Franco's double, nineteen eighty eight
It's a Time for Defiance, a romance set during the

(20:47):
Spanish Civil War, and two thousand and three's The Fourth
Floor about seriously ill youths at a Spanish cancer ward.
As for his other genre films, there's nineteen seventy five
Bloodstains in a New Car, a kind of follow up
to this film, I think in some ways has the
same lead actor. Oh and then there is a nineteen
eighty three kids monster mash film, a monster mash in

(21:09):
that it has a franking stense monster, has a dracula,
a were wolf, and so forth. It's titled good Night
Mister Monster, and I'm glad to report that it does
feature Paul Nashi as the were wolf. I'm also to
understand that it is a disco musical with some rocky
horror aspirations.

Speaker 3 (21:27):
Oh wow, I gotta see that. Well, I should have
thought of it when I picked this movie. But there
have to be multiple Paul Nashi connections, right, We're gonna
get several, aren't we?

Speaker 2 (21:36):
There are yes? And also that's I mean, for better
or worse, That's how I end up grounding any Spanish cinema.
I'm like, okay, how many decrease the separation are we
from Paul Nashi?

Speaker 3 (21:47):
So I found a quote of Antonio Mercero's where he's
trying to describe the themes of his own work, and
he basically says in all of his movies there are
three elements. He says, in all my works, I have
used three consps, pain, love and humor. It's a strange cocktail,
I know, and often I've asked myself how I could
mix elements potentially so different from one another. But in

(22:10):
practice they have been landmarks in developing my creations. And
you know what, yep, that's they're all three are here
in the Telephone Box less love than anything else, but
there is a bit of love, and the bit of
love makes the horror much more painful. And of course
there's humor too, So check on all three, all right.

Speaker 2 (22:30):
The other writer credited here is jose Lewis Garci born
nineteen forty four, claimed Spanish writer and director who directed
four films nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars,
begin The Beginning at nineteen eighty two and that one
actually won Double Feature in eighty four, Course Completed in
nineteen eighty seven, and The Grandfather in nineteen ninety eight.

(22:53):
He's also credited with a handful of horror films from
the nineteen nineties, but I couldn't find out much about
these but he he's certainly best known for his dramas,
his comedies, and his social commentary. Now our star really
the when I say star in the short thirty minute film,
he's pretty much like the I mean, he's the focal

(23:14):
point the whole time. He is our gray man. He
is the man trapped in the telephone booth. It's his
performance within the telephone booth that is. And again we
barely hear from him. He is mostly sealed in there.
There is no sound. It's just a pure visual, mime
like performance.

Speaker 3 (23:32):
He has a few lines at the beginning, yeah, but
almost no dialogue for this protagonist.

Speaker 2 (23:37):
Yeah. This is again Jose Leuis Lopez Vasquez, who with
nineteen twenty two through two thousand and nine a claim
Spanish actor who's largely comedic work eventually shifted towards the
serious during the nineteen seventies. He worked in theater initially
before working his way into cinema with various odd jobs
in cinema, and then his career really began to take

(23:58):
off in the nineteen fifties. So today's film certainly emerges
during a prominent part of his career when he's switching
into more for the most part into more serious roles
and finding a great deal of success there. Some of
his most critically well received films are from this time period.
In fact, he won two Chicago International Film Festival Awards

(24:20):
for his performances in the early seventies, particularly two films
of note, The First I've Seen It attributed to nineteen
seventy and other places to nineteen seventy one, a film
titled The Anchises Would, a well regarded folk horror film
about historical Spanish serial killer and self professed werewolf Manuel Blanco.

(24:42):
Roma Santo Vasquez plays a fictional character based on accounts
of this individual from the novel by Carlos Martinez Barbito.
It's a serious role and only his I think, second
big non comedic role, following the Acclaims aological thriller Peppermint Frape.
In nineteen sixty eight, The Anchises Woods earned him numerous nominations,

(25:06):
and then in nineteen seventy two he was in a
film titled My Dearest Senorita. This was a groundbreaking Spanish
film dealing with sex change and intersexualism, in which Fasquez
plays Adella, who becomes Juan. I haven't seen this film
and so I can't speak for how well at Sinsibela
sensibilities concerning sex and gender matchup with where we are today,

(25:27):
but it apparently broke new ground at the time, especially
in Spain, as such subjects had largely been banned under
the oppressive Franco regime. And during this time there's like
a sort of and this is also discussed in that
article we referenced earlier, during this time period, there's kind
of a breaking down of some of those strict rules

(25:48):
concerning media as Spain is beginning to sort of reach
out and try and sort of fit in with the
larger European world around them. And so, you know, a
few years earlier, film like this would not have been released,
but Vesquez's performance here earned widespread acclaim, and the film
itself was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the

(26:09):
forty fifth Academy Awards. So these two films were instrumental
in his shift to more dramatic work, including nineteen seventy
one's The Garden of Delights seventy fives, Zorito Martinez seventy
Six's Este Signor di Negro. But of course, as far
as connections go, you might be wondering, Okay, did he
work with any of the Spanish cinema mainstays from the

(26:30):
time period that we've discussed on the show before, And
the answer is yes, So Frank Bronna multiple times, Lewis
Barbou multiple times, Helga Line, Yes, I think at least
one or two pictures there. And indeed there is a
Paul Nashi connection as well. So Nashi I think had
an uncredited part in the nineteen sixty six film that

(26:53):
Veasquez also appears in. But Vasquez definitely appears in a
pair of Nashi written and directed films, though sadly they're
from Paul Nashi's late period. So there's a family drama
titled My Friend the Vagabond, and then that's from nineteen
eighty four, and then there's a nineteen eighty five film
titled Operation Mantis that is like a slapstick spy movie

(27:16):
that I think was just negatively received across the board.
He did all the genres, didn't they Yeah, at one
point or another. I've got his horror box sets, but
I don't see his slapstick spy movies. Yeah, I mean
the horror I think is by most accounts, the best
I think that's also where Paul Nashy's heart ultimately was,
And some of these other genres are often things he

(27:38):
was getting into later in his career when Gothic horror
had lost its popularity in Spanish cinema. So yeah, these
are generally not as well received and or are not
as widely known outside of Spain.

Speaker 3 (27:52):
I think that he's done at least a couple of
movies about characters who are either actors or filmmakers and
just want to keep doing universal style monster movies and
there's pressure for them to do like action and stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:05):
Yeah, Now I can't speak for how Vesquez performs in
those two pictures, but in fact, in any other picture.
This is the only thing I've seen Vesquez in, But
now I want to see more of him because he's
so good in the telephone Box again, the quiet dignity
in the face of all this inconvenience and embarrassment, the
gradual erosion of his resolve as the situation steadily descends

(28:29):
into panic and terror. You know, it's all They're all
wordless and soundless within this soundproof sarcophagus, and we know
next to nothing about his character, and yet we feel
we know him so well by the end of it,
you know, just based on the nuances of the performance
and also some of these nice key supporting details, like
you know, obviously there's as we'll discuss, like there's this

(28:50):
love for his son, and there's this photograph of his family.
But also I like, I really love the detail of
his colorful tie. Yeah, it really felt like otherwise he's
wearing this kind of you know, just boring business suit,
but he has this really nice tie that makes him
feel like a guy who has found this one small
way to allow his individualism to burst free and shine,

(29:15):
you know, and it's very much filtered and held back,
but you can get a sense of his inner light. Oh.

Speaker 3 (29:21):
I think the tie is a great detail. Not to
contradict to you, but you described it as colorful. It
is visually interesting, but it's actually rather earth toned. It's
basically brown and black.

Speaker 2 (29:34):
I interpreted it as kind of an orange, but.

Speaker 3 (29:36):
Oh well, maybe it is kind of orange. I mean,
but it's not like you know, rain the whole rainbow.
It's like a kind of brown or orange and black.
But it does have these very striking expressive designs on it.
It's like these kind of watery swirls in a way.

Speaker 2 (29:51):
Yeah, yeah, kind of ya waves.

Speaker 3 (29:53):
Yeah, sorry, folks, we just had to scroll down to
our screenshots to make sure we're describing the tie correct.
I don't know they could so it is like black,
but it is the other color, like could be brown
or maybe orange or maybe gold. It's a little hard
to tell in the light quality because it's like under
a really bright sun, which is another thing about this character.
He's stuck in a glass box in the middle of

(30:15):
like right under this noonday sun. So he's like baking
in there, but he's got this tie on and yeah,
it's I don't know what you call this pattern, but
it's like these kind of spirals or swirls that look
kind of like, I don't know, dabs of paint almost
maybe made with the fingers or something.

Speaker 2 (30:33):
It's interesting, all right, More on the necktie in a bit,
Okay that there There are other actors in the picture,
but mostly it's a one man show, though I do
want to mention the burly man, the sort of like
heavy set strong man that comes to try and bust
him out of the phone booth. This character is played

(30:54):
by Tito Garcia, who lived nineteen thirty one through two
thousand and three, I wrote ton Spanish character act whose
credits include various westerns, also the Jess Franco film The
Awful Doctor Orloff, and a pair of nasty films nineteen
eighties Human Beasts, Oh, and nineteen eighty one's Night of
the Werewolf, which we previously covered on Weird House Cinema.
He's one of the two grave robbers that accidentally reawakens Voldemartininski.

Speaker 3 (31:18):
Okay, I've seen both of those. Night of the Werewolf's
a lot better. Human Beasts didn't love that one.

Speaker 2 (31:24):
Yeah, kind of a nasty one and also but in
very action oriented in its early goings. Yeah, but I
have to say Garcia is good here. This could have
easily been a real over the top, blueto stole performance,
and I guess it is. But there are these nuances,
you know, like this guy's trying to do the right
thing despite of the onlookers, but also kind of because

(31:46):
of the onlookers. Yeah, and it all comes off quite
believable in my estimation.

Speaker 3 (31:51):
I want to talk later on when we get into
some of the themes about the way the film portrays
the people who stop to help the guy in the box. Yeah,
I think there's interesting stuff about the choices there.

Speaker 2 (32:03):
Now getting into the music here. Early on in the picture,
the subtitles generously refer to the music as jazz, and
I'm guessing it's probably stock music. But it also kind
of works perfectly because it feels energetic but lifeless, you know,
it's this sort of humdrum modernity, like this is what
we have done to jazz. And later on in the

(32:26):
picture we have a rather kind of startling shift in tone.
I mean, we've been building up to it, but there
is this shift in tone, and we get a shift
in the music as well, and suddenly we're utilizing the
music of German composer and educator Carl Orff, who lived
eighteen ninety five through nineteen eighty two, best known probably
for Carmina burana, which has been used to great effect

(32:48):
in many a film, including John Borman's ex Caliber. His
music has also been used in such pictures as nineteen
seventy Three's bad Lands by Terrence Malick. This film makes
use of a cantata from his operetta Trianfo diafrediti.

Speaker 3 (33:05):
Now, initially the use of this composition did lead to
a legal dispute. Orf tried to sue Marso because he
said that one of his compositions was used without permission.
Marcero pleaded that it was an accident. He said he
used it. He had meant to ask for permission and
then forgot to, and he settled out of settled out
of court with Orf. Apparently they met up and they

(33:26):
watched the film together, and they came to some kind
of agreement, and then Orf approved the use of his music.
But initially that was a bit of a sticky point
about this. Unclear to me if Marcero actually did just
forget and it was an accident, an honest mistake, or
if he was trying to get away with something. I
don't know. Either way.

Speaker 2 (33:43):
I do feel like the orph music is used really
well here. He kept us the sense of the transcendent,
the tragic, and much more.

Speaker 3 (33:51):
Oh yeah, unimpeachable choice to use four effect in the film.
And just wish he had wish he had gone to
Orf at first.

Speaker 2 (33:58):
All right, Well, let's get right into the plot.

Speaker 3 (34:00):
All right, So you can kind of divide this movie
into three parts. There's the opening that takes place in
the phone booth within a plaza in Madrid. And then
there's the middle part that's sort of a journey, and
then there is the climax, which is when we descend
and descend into the underworld. So the first third, as
I said, takes place in a plaza in Madrid. It's

(34:22):
a real place apparently called the Plaza del Conde del
vaer de Sushil, And the credits play in this blood
red typewriter font all lowercase over views of the city
framed by tall, blocky apartment towers.

Speaker 2 (34:38):
Yeah, apparently this is a rather nice part of Madrid,
a traditional district with an aristocratic architectural flare, according to
Torismo Madrid. So I take the word for it.

Speaker 3 (34:51):
Yeah, it seems like an elegant part of the city.
So as we first come in, we're looking up at
the sky at the tops of the buildings, but then
the camera pans down to the plaza, which is in
one sense, yes, it is quite pleasant, like it is
surrounded by trees, as this big yard where kids can
play soccer. But in another sense, at least in the
way it is framed, it's kind of claustrophobic because we

(35:13):
see it boxed in on all sides by these nondescript
high rises.

Speaker 2 (35:18):
Yeah, I feel like there's a weird sense of balance here,
an uneasy balance, but balanced nonetheless. So like the apartment
complexes are modern and nice, thus pacifying. Apparently government pressure
to include a sense of modern Madrid to showcase to
the world. Yes, but on the other it's kind of like, well, okay,

(35:38):
whatever you may have lost to these sort of stacked
confines of apartment living, at least you have these nice
green spaces and pluses.

Speaker 3 (35:45):
Yeah, we should have mentioned this earlier. But yeah, as
you said, showing off the beautiful modernizing Madrid was apparently
a requirement to satisfy the government sensors, you know, the
kind of ministry that they didn't know if this script
was going to get a proove to be made a
made for TV movie, And it did. But one of
the conditions was, okay, you got to make Madrid look nice.

(36:06):
You know, we got good stuff going on here.

Speaker 2 (36:09):
Yeah, as we'll discuss, as is often the case, government
mandates for the arts can often be twisted around and
weaponized in very inventive ways. And then that may be
what's going on here.

Speaker 3 (36:25):
Yeah, there may be a kind of malicious compliance with
the sensors. So at first when we come in, the
soundscape here is chirping birds and the grinding of motors
and machinery. It's early in the morning, and the first
thing we see in terms of action is a dark
green flatbed truck rolling into the plaza with a bright

(36:46):
red new telephone box as its cargo. The truck slows down,
backs up to the edge of the yard, and then
four men in telephone company uniforms get out. They unload
the box, carry it to the middle of the plaza,
and efficiently install it. And I want to note that
nothing really feels ominous at this point. There's no indication

(37:06):
that this is a horror movie. The birds are chirping,
the music is bright, almost whimsical. It feels much more
like the opening of a lighthearted family comedy than a
horror film.

Speaker 2 (37:18):
Yeah, like we said, the sun is bright. You get
the sense that there's no danger here because everybody's at
work or at school, like, nobody's creeping about. It's just
people here on official business. And especially given the nineteen
seventies feel to everything, I was reminded of a lot
of live action sesame street shorts. Yeah, I feel like
I just needed a child's narration about telephones or the
letter P.

Speaker 3 (37:39):
This is how they make saxophones.

Speaker 2 (37:40):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (37:42):
The only thing that potentially registers as threatening to me,
and it didn't when I first watched this was only
upon rewatching. The only thing that is potentially threatening is
the camera angle, because instead of watching this scene from
the ground, we begin with the camera way up above,
of surveying everything from a distance in the sky, as

(38:04):
if we were watching like security camera footage or something.
And this could allow to set in a kind of
subconscious awareness of the scene in the plaza as being
monitored by distant and unfeeling observers, which is a powerful
kind of horror feeling to create within fiction when you
take like a mundane scene or activity, something that is

(38:28):
not unsettling by itself, but then suddenly give the impression
that it is being watched unsympathetically. It reminds me of
the excellent opening sentence of HG. Well's War of the Worlds,
where he says, quote, no one would have believed in
the last years of the nineteenth century that this world
was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than

(38:51):
man's and yet as mortal as his own, that as
men busied themselves about their various concerns, they were scrutinized
and studied, perhaps most as narrowly as a man with
a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and
multiply and a drop of water.

Speaker 2 (39:08):
M Yeah, that's a good point. This may be ultimately
because I had some sense of where things were going,
but I also found it a tiny bit foreboding that
the box is carried around via inserted staves, like it's
the Arc of the Covenant or something, you know. I
don't know, I just I don't see workmen carrying things
around like this. Maybe this is accurate, or maybe it

(39:30):
is kind of a nod to something strange.

Speaker 3 (39:33):
I'm not sure. Yeah, with the poles inserted, it's like
the Arc of the Covenant, or like a palan quinin
which is especially funny slash disturbing when there is actually
a person inside the box. So they're being carried like
a king accepted as they're not being treated well.

Speaker 2 (39:50):
Yeah. Yeah, And there are a number of visual comparisons
that end up being made between the box and other
things in the world. We'll discuss as we proceed.

Speaker 3 (40:00):
So anyway, the phone company guys install the box. They
bolt it down to the earth and they get in
their truck and drive away, and we see the box
just left in the middle of the square. It is
the brightest object in the frame. The door is hanging
open invitingly. It looks absolutely jolly. And after this we
get a kind of slice of life of the residents
of the local buildings. In the morning, we see a

(40:21):
gardener out watering the plants in the plaza with a hose.
Children running around, playing and chasing after each other before
they have to go to the school bus. There are
some nuns out on a walk. We see this cool guy, Rob.
I've got a screenshop for you to look at. Here's
a guy with a button up shirt with a big
seventies collar and big sunglasses. I like his look.

Speaker 2 (40:43):
He's got some books there. It has to return those
to the library or something.

Speaker 3 (40:47):
Yeah, I bet their books on the occult. They've got
to be interlibrary loan for the Necronomicon. So eventually we
meet our protagonist again. He is an unnamed middle aged
man in a business suit with this seventies tie with
the cool design on it. He is bald on the
top of his head, with a horseshoe of dark hair

(41:09):
and a mustache. And from what I've read, I think
this guy is supposed to look like a sort of
stereotyped character, a stereotypical urban businessman in nineteen seventies Spain.
This is our gray man. And the gray man is
not alone. He is leaving home in the morning with
his son, who's a boy of maybe ten or twelve

(41:30):
or so, and his son is out bouncing a blue
soccer ball. So the sun is like kicking the soccer
ball around and at one point he kicks it and
it flies into the new phone booth because the door
is just hanging right open, and upon rewatch. I was
horrified because I forgot about this moment, but I remember
at this part. The boy he goes into the phone

(41:52):
booth to retrieve the ball, and he stops for a
second like he's messing around. I think he's dawdling before school.
And he goes to pick up the phone receipt and
his dad comes over is like, come on, no, get
out of there, and the boy does, and he never
closes the door again. There is still if you don't
know what's coming. There's nothing overtly frightening at this point.
It's only on rewatch that this moment becomes tense. But

(42:15):
the boy points out that the phone booth is new,
and the father acts almost as if he would not
have noticed that fact otherwise. So they walk off to
catch the school bus. The father gives his son a
kiss and says goodbye for the day, and then while
walking back the way he came, the gray man stops
beside the phone booth and he seems to remember that
he needs to make a call, so he steps inside.

(42:39):
And I noticed this also on rewatch. We never learn
who he was planning to call or what he was
calling about, never find out.

Speaker 2 (42:47):
I mean, it was probably something mundane and boring, Like
he's like, ah, I forgot I'm supposed to call about
those tickets for the weekend, or I forgot to call
about the laundry. You know, nowadays, we would stop halfway
between point A and pot B pull out her cell
phone and send that quick email or text message. And
I assume that's just what's going on here.

Speaker 3 (43:07):
But when the man lifts the receiver in the phone booth,
he does not hear a dial tone, so he starts
fiddling around with the phone, trying to make it work. Meanwhile,
behind his back, the door to the box quietly folds shut.
It's just like a venus flytrap closing on its prey.
And still there is nothing yet to let you know

(43:28):
this is horror. The man just keeps messing around with
the phone to try to figure out what's wrong. Eventually
he gives up and he tries to leave, but now
the door is closed and it will not open, and
he pushes and pulls and it is not going anywhere.
And then he just stands back and folds his arms, like,
oh brother, this is all I need very much. In

(43:49):
the mime school of posture.

Speaker 2 (43:51):
Yeah yeah, so at this point again, yeah, there's no
musical sting to drive home what's happening. The ceiling of
the phone booth is this low key and natural as
can be. And initially it's just like, oh goodness, yeah,
I've got one more thing now I have to do
in my day, and it's get out of this phone booth.
But you know, it seems like I've just got to
figure this out.

Speaker 3 (44:10):
Right.

Speaker 2 (44:10):
It's like there's a latch or there's something. This will
just take a minute.

Speaker 3 (44:14):
Yeah, And so his initial struggles give rise to I
think some of the most famous images from the movie,
images you see clipped out around the internet, ones that
are reproduced, and stills and graffiti and on the poster.
It's just the man struggling in this situation. He looks
around the inside of the box. He's probably trying to
find some kind of release mechanism or something that he's

(44:35):
pressing on the corners and searching up and down, but nothing.
The door is locked and there is no apparent way
to get out. So next a couple of men come along.
There is a guy in a polo shirt and then
an older man and a jacket, and they come along

(44:59):
walk past the box, and the man in the box
pantomimes to them that he needs help getting out, and
so the two men stop to try. I think it's
worth noting that in their performance they never seem to
care all that much. They do not act like they
are concerned for the man. They do stop to help,

(45:20):
but for example, the first thing they do is they
go to the man and they suggest that he try
pushing on the door. Then when that clearly doesn't work,
they start trying to pull on the door from the outside,
but it's not moving, and then they declare, well, we're
late for work, and they move on, leaving the man behind.

Speaker 2 (45:38):
Yeah, the guys are basically like, look, we've done exactly
as much as the Social contract Demand's office, and then
they move on. And this is a vibe that's going
to continue throughout the film, where different people attempt to help,
their actions always very much within the neuro confines of
what society and or their job requires of them.

Speaker 3 (45:58):
And the thing I want to emphasize is it's true
of them and basically everybody else who comes along. They
do briefly stop to try to help, but it never
feels like they see him or like they're concerned for him.
It's just kind of like, oh, here's a little problem, eh, okay,
can't fix it, see.

Speaker 2 (46:15):
You, Yeah, And they never seem to appreciate any real danger.
And of course we don't truly begin and our main
character doesn't truly begin to understand the danger till later.

Speaker 3 (46:25):
So in the meantime, while these guys are pulling on
the door, several spectators sort of gather up around the scene.
There are some adult women coming back from the store,
they stop to look at him from a distance. There's
a group of evil children who begin pointing and laughing
at him, and they gather outside the door to the box.
They're mocking him. They're saying, like, what's wrong with you? Man?

(46:45):
And one of them says, should we throw you peanuts?
And the children run in circles around the box, hooting
at him, and they're just having the time of their lives.
This is hilarious. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:55):
How many Spanish films have we seen at this point
where mobs of children mock an adults predicament. I think
this is at least the third one.

Speaker 3 (47:02):
That's the mainstay of Paul Nashy movies. Also, yeah, it's
just mobs of evil children.

Speaker 2 (47:07):
Yeah, I believe it also showed up in the Tomb
of the Blind Dead film that we watch. It's like
Spanish Spanish children in these movies are just out to
shame and harass.

Speaker 3 (47:16):
So I think it's kind of interesting to note all
of the different characters who become part of the crowd
around the man in the box. So there's a guy
carrying an ornate cushioned chair on his head. I think
he might he's supposed to be a mover maybe maybe
somebody is moving into one of these apartment buildings, and
he stops and he puts the chair down in the
in the yard, just to watch the scene. And then

(47:39):
there's a man who's or it's a young man I guess,
going around selling pastries from a tray. He gets robbed. Later,
a couple of movers are unloading a large, polished mirror
that has like baroque framing on the outside, and they
stop and they put the mirror down to watch what's happening.
A few women nearby they sit down on a bench

(48:01):
and begin knitting and they're knitting. That's when you really
know you're in trouble. And so next we get to
the large man, Tito Garcia. Here he's this big guy
carrying an athletic bag. I think it's a Puma brand bag.

Speaker 2 (48:16):
Yeah, Like I guess he's going to the gym or
just came back from the gym.

Speaker 3 (48:19):
Yeah, he's a weightlifter guy. And he comes to the
rescue and he's like, Okay, everybody, get out of the way.
I'm the strongest. I'll get this thing open. And he
tugs and he tugs, and it's played a bit for comedy.
All he succeeds in is breaking the handle off of
the door, and then he tries repeatedly ramming the glass

(48:40):
with his shoulder like he's a charging bull, but to
no avail. And this is all played for physical comedy.

Speaker 2 (48:46):
Yeah, but you know, you do get the vibe that
he is trying to do what's right, both in the
eyes of the gray man inside, but also the crowd
of onlookers, like there's a performative aspect of what's going on,
even though as he begins to fail at this task,
they begin to sort of mock him as well. But

(49:06):
in the end, once more, there's only so much he
can do and has to do in everyone's eyes, and
it's kind of like, well, it is what it is.
I gave it a good go, but I've got places
to be buddy. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (49:17):
Once again, I feel like he never seems to really
see or be concerned about the man inside. He's just like, oh,
here's a problem. I'm strong, I can get this thing open.
And he tries and tries, and then he's humiliated and
then last to leave. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:31):
Yeah, but yeah, there's never a sense that he cares
about the individual in the box. He wants to obey
the social contract. He wants to sort of appease the
crowd and perhaps himself in his own ego. But does
he really see the gray man at all in a sense.

Speaker 1 (49:49):
No.

Speaker 3 (49:50):
Somewhere in here there's an interesting moment where the man
in the box sees his reflection in the fancy mirror
that the movers have set down across from him and
on Rewatch. I thought this was kind of interesting because
a few things happen here, for one thing, and the
man sees himself in the mirror. He's clearly embarrassed, and
he kind of tries to adjust his appearance in a way.

(50:12):
But this is also the first moment where it felt
to me like Vasquez's performance, where the man's demeanor shifts
a little bit from frustration and embarrassment to worry.

Speaker 2 (50:25):
Yeah. Yeah, And of course I love just the idea
of bringing the mirror into this. It feels very borges esque,
you know. And also the mirror is of course a
person in a box sort and so the man in
the box is now reflected and is another man in
the box. And I think maybe now he's seeing himself

(50:47):
from the outside, right, he's seeing what other people are
seeing that he is this person trapped within and maybe
less of a person, you know, he is just he
is within something else. He he's no longer like this
free part of the world.

Speaker 3 (51:02):
I think that's right. Yeah, But then so we we're
gonna get another attempt to intervene. So the guy who
was carrying the mirror next tries to show that he
he's the one who can get the box open. He's like,
it takes not strength but skill, and so he pulls
out his tools. He's got like a screwdriver. He has
the tools and he has the know how. So we
see him searching all over the box looking for the
place where he can unscrew the door and get it open,

(51:25):
but he finds nothing. It's like it was made not
to be disassembled.

Speaker 2 (51:29):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (51:29):
And then he tries to pry the door open with
his tools, but he can't get that done either. And
then while the screwdriver man is working and the crowd
is watching, Uh, the man in the telephone box, he
like witnesses things happening outside. I thought this was so interesting.
So everybody's watching him, and then he's looking out through
the windows seeing things happening in the crowd. That other

(51:53):
people are not seeing. He's like seeing what is not
otherwise observed. So he like watches a man steal pastries
from the pastry vendors tray and cram them in his mouth,
and he walks. He sees a man walk by behind
the crowd with multicolored balloons. He sees the mover who
set down the cushioned chair, offering the chair to an

(52:15):
elderly woman who is also there watching the scene, which
is funny because it's like it's like a gesture of kindness,
but not toward the man in the box, only toward
another member of his unwonted audience. And then finally, uh oh,
here comes the fuzz. So two uniformed police come marching
up to the scene.

Speaker 2 (52:35):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (52:36):
And I've read other reviewers mentioning feeling at this moment
when they watched it, like, oh, okay, the authorities are here,
the situation is under control now.

Speaker 2 (52:44):
But nope, Well, you know, given the sort of rule
of three, right, if this were some sort of a parable,
and it definitely feel it has more of the trappings
of parable. I think when we tell listeners what's happening here,
it feels like okay now, And then the third people
that came and tried to solve the riddle. They were
able to solve it because they had legal authority to
do so. But, like you say, this is also not

(53:06):
going to work, right.

Speaker 3 (53:07):
So the cops here have an awesome way of dealing
with the situation. They arrive and they tell the man
with the screwdriver to get away from the box, and
they tell the man stuck in the box to get
out immediately, and then when he shows that he can't,
they start barking threats at him and saying, didn't you
hear me, I said, get out of there now? Yeah.

Speaker 2 (53:27):
So, once more they follow procedure, they enforce their authority,
but they are unable to help and gladly step aside
to let some other authorized party jump in. And during
this section of the short film here I thought quite
a bit about the bystander effect in all of this.
This is that psychological theory that I believe we've talked

(53:47):
about in the show before. It states that the presence
of others tends to discourage an individual from intervening. So
in the more people there are, arguably the less likely
any individual is to help. And this is not necessarily
grounded in any kind of like state of innate cruelty
or anything. If there is a conscious energy to it all,

(54:08):
it is often something along the lines of, oh, well,
someone more qualified, someone more official, or someone more just
someone closer to the situation, they're going to jump in
and do what needs to be done. I'm not that person.
And this is why if you've ever taken any CPR
classes before, they always stress that you don't say, hey,
someone called nine one one, because there's too much room

(54:30):
for people to say, yes, that's a great idea. Someone
should do that, maybe someone closer to the situation or
someone unless No, what you do is you point at
someone and you tell them to call nine to one one.
Because if you leave it open, then there's this there's
a high likelihood that nothing is going to be done,
or it's going to take far longer for some decision

(54:50):
to be made.

Speaker 3 (54:51):
Yeah, everybody assumes somebody else is doing it, or it
takes them too long to figure out who's doing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:57):
So when the when the police kind of run out
of options, that you know someone else is about to
arrive on the scene. It's the fire department and they're like, oh, well,
good fire department will take care.

Speaker 3 (55:06):
Of it, okay, see yah, So the fire department, it
really seems like these are the ones who are going
to solve the problem, right. So they've they've got ladders
and axes and everything they need to get inside this box.
So they get like one of the fire firefighters gets
up on top of the box and it seems like
he is going to smash the glass in.

Speaker 2 (55:27):
And I was really thinking this was going to do it,
surely like they had. Finally someone has the tools. It
seems it's a little violent, but it looks like this
is going to work.

Speaker 3 (55:36):
But just then an even higher authority arrives, the phone company.
So finally the right people for the job. The phone
company truck parks and four men get out, I think
the same fore men who installed the box earlier, and
they One thing I thought was worth noting, we never

(55:56):
get a very close look at any of the phone
company workers, whatever they actually are, the people dressed up
in the green uniforms who put the box there. But
from a distance they all look vaguely like the man
stuck inside the box. They're all like middle aged men
who are balding on top with a horseshoe of dark hair.

Speaker 2 (56:17):
That's a good point. Yeah, they're just very much bland,
everyday men, they are, and we get far we get
far less character from these. We don't get a sense
of the same sort of interpersonal connection that we do
with these other phases of helpers or would be helpers.

Speaker 3 (56:33):
That's right. So the four men come and they unbolt
the phone booth from the earth, they lift it up,
they insert the poles to carry it, and then they
carry it back to their flatbed truck, put it on
the truck bed and drive away, all with the man
still stuck inside, and everybody at the assembled crowd they're
all cheering and celebrating, like this is what's supposed to happen.

Speaker 2 (56:56):
Yeah, it's like somebody who knows what they're doing came something,
so things are okay now.

Speaker 3 (57:02):
But the guy in the box is like, wait, what
what's going on? But from everybody outside's perspective, it's like
it's absurd. But it almost is plausible that that is
how a crowd would react, because it's now like by
removing the man in a in a kind of weird
psychological way, the people who were standing around can be
like the situation has been resolved.

Speaker 2 (57:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (57:25):
Yeah, So this gives rise to the middle section of
the movie, where the man is still stuck in the
booth and now he's riding around on the back of
the truck. I did notice this earlier, actually, but I
thought we've got to mention at some point, so I

(57:46):
do want to mention here how hot it seems like
it would be inside that booth. Was just like the
sun blasting down through the glass and the doors are stuck.
And apparently this was actually an issue during filmmaking that,
like the actor in the box, it was quite hot
in there, and they at some points had to like
angle shots in certain ways so that you couldn't see

(58:08):
that pains had to be removed from parts of the
box just to allow some air to circulate, or it
would get unbearably hot inside. But during this section of
the short, the truck is driving around Madrid and the
man is becoming increasingly distressed. He tries to get the
attention of the workers in the truck, but they won't
even look at him like that. It's not like they're menacing.

(58:29):
They just eyes forward, driving, no acknowledgment of him at
all other people on the road, much like the crowd
earlier just do not seem to take him seriously, Like
they stare at him, they're kind of amused, or they
mock him and laugh at him. We see some young
attractive people in a convertible like pull up next to
the truck in traffic, and they're all pointing at him,

(58:51):
and one of them jokingly, I think, asks if they
can make a phone call.

Speaker 2 (58:55):
Yeah, And this whole time too, we're driving past more
high rise apartment buildings in various high rise buildings in Madrid.
And this is another I think there's some great visual
poetry going on here between the vertical phone booth and
the vertical buildings, the idea of these towers of modernity

(59:17):
in here, this sort of little tower of modernity in
which our main character is trapped.

Speaker 3 (59:22):
Yeah. And so obviously this section of the movie is
where they were fulfilling part of their obligation to the
Ministry office that was like show us Madrid modernizing. And
so we get some of these views of the city,
but I think a lot of them are sort of
situated and edited together actually to make us feel some
amount of dread. Yeah, yeah, because we see like buildings

(59:46):
being constructed and so in a way all like construction,
that's growth, that's modernizing this good, but we see kind
of the bones of a building in a way that's
a little unsettling, especially because we see them back to
back with a moment where the truck stops outside of
a church where there's a funeral going on and it's
a funeral with a glass coffin.

Speaker 2 (01:00:07):
Yeah, and yeah, the comparison there is obvious and rather foreboding.
But but then also gave what you mentioned about the
we see these buildings that are being built, and it
is there's this kind of feeling like something modern and
out of control is happening, you know, And that's what's

(01:00:27):
happening on the micro level here with the phone booths
as well, or at least that's the sense I'm beginning
to get, like there's some sort of a process going
on here. People you know, delivered one of these things,
it trapped somebody, and now they're taking it away, and
there's this feeling that nobody is at the wheel, or
that's the the overbearing feeling that I got from it,

(01:00:47):
like there are just machinations in process. They are completely unfeeling,
nobody approved them, nobody's fighting them. It's just what's happening, uh,
and you and you were just in the wrong place
of the wrong time.

Speaker 3 (01:01:00):
Will it connects to a kind of to a kind
of real world horror that I think a lot of
people will have some experience with the feeling of like
when you are in some way to your detriment being
the object of an institutional process something by like a
you know, a big corporation or a government or some
big institution, and there's no way for you to feel

(01:01:24):
like you are getting a foothold with that organization, like
they're paying attention to your needs. And that kind of
experience can of course run the whole gamut from just
like a very frustrating inconvenience to like severe oppression of
a person's rights, and in any sense it feels bad,
but it can go from much like this story does,
from the inconvenient to the horrifying. Now right around here

(01:01:48):
in the stories, the first moment where I would say
the energy really seems to tip over when it crosses
the threshold into horror, and that moment is when the
truck pulls up next to a playground and there are
children singing a kind of song where it's some kind
of I don't know, old like nursery rhyme song that

(01:02:10):
talks about like Easter and the Trinity. And the truck
stops and it stops next to another phone company truck,
on which there is also a red telephone box with
a man stuck inside.

Speaker 2 (01:02:22):
Yeah, and that's where we begin to realize this is
not a singular incident, This is not maybe not that
much of an anomaly, This is maybe happening all the time.

Speaker 3 (01:02:32):
Yeah, And so the men are unable to talk, like
because they're both stuck in the boxes, but they look
at each other and you see them both like a
kind of horror or dawning on them when they see
one another. Also because they're kind of dressed the same
and look similar, like they just like look like similar guys.
And they see each other and they they're aware something

(01:02:54):
frightening is happening, and they're both powerless to do anything
about it. So you can see a it's weird almost
to kind of like pity for each other but also
a kind of resentment for each other in the like
seeing what the other one means for them. Yeah. Another
interesting moment, I wonder what you made of this was

(01:03:14):
the part where the truck crosses paths on the outskirts
of the city, Like there are these ruins a kind
of collapsing old wall, and they cross paths with a
group of circus performers. There are these guys juggling and
in clown makeup sitting on this collapsing wall. One guy's
holding a ship in a bottle. Oh, it's it's an

(01:03:34):
unsettling moment. And I would say the men sitting there,
like the circus performers do seem to kind of look
at the guy in the phone booth with more recognition
and pity than most of the other observers in the
story do. But I'm not sure what was really meant
by this.

Speaker 2 (01:03:53):
Yeah, and I think, like everything in the picture, that
they keep it vague so that you can have various interpretations.
But I guess what I took away from this is maybe,
like the circus performers here have a certain amount of freedom,
like they live on the outside, and in fact they
are situated in this shot on the other side of
a wall that separates them from the truck in the

(01:04:14):
phone booth, So you know, in a way they like
pity his condition in his circumstance, but they understand it
insofar as they have escaped it.

Speaker 3 (01:04:26):
Yeah. Yeah. And then right after this comes I was
maybe the saddest part in the whole thing, which is
when the truck crosses paths with a young boy. There's
like a young boy out playing with a ball, and
the boy waves to the man. This is another point
I guess where the man does. It does feel like
somebody actually sees the man and kind of like recognizes

(01:04:46):
his humanity and all that. But he when he sees
this boy, obviously he thinks about his son, and he
thinks about his son earlier, and he remembers the soccer
ball bouncing into the phone booth that morning. And I
think it's a wrong image because it implies simultaneously a
kind of horror. This man's worrying about his own situation

(01:05:07):
and worrying how he's going to get out of this
and whether he's going to see his son again. But
also there's a kind of relief in the memory, I think,
because he realizes that his son could have been the
one trapped in the box and he wasn't. Then after
this he just keeps getting weirder. Suddenly there's a helicopter
following the truck. Why the helicopter. I never knew what

(01:05:28):
to make of that.

Speaker 2 (01:05:29):
I think the helicopter just means like someone is watching.
It's almost like the eye of God. But then it
becomes it offers no comfort because in this situation, God
is doing nothing. Whoever is in the helicopter, who's observing
from the helicopter, they're not interfering with this, They're just

(01:05:50):
I guess, documenting it. And again there's just this overbearing
coldness to the whole scenario.

Speaker 3 (01:05:56):
So the truck leads through some strange and amazing locations.
At one point it goes down this mountain side road,
zigzagging down, down and down into a valley near a
huge dam. And then finally at the end of this road,
we pass out of the sunlight, which has been beating down.
So you might imagine you almost kind of feel a

(01:06:16):
physical relief because this man's been under the glass under
the hot sun and it has just been roasting him
in there. And they finally pass into darkness. But things
are not getting better. So the truck goes into an
underground facility and it drives down a long dark road
and a tunnel. There are little sort of utility lights
all along the walls, and as it goes deeper, it

(01:06:40):
passes more and more unsettling things. The man sees lots
of empty red telephone boxes being cleaned and prepared by
phone company workers. Again, if that's actually what they are,
they're just men in green uniforms. We see trucks leaving
the facility loaded with telephone boxes, and the tone markedly shift.

(01:07:00):
There is no longer any ambiguity or any hint of
comedy or whimsy. The music lets you know that things
have gotten very dark.

Speaker 2 (01:07:08):
That's right, Yeah, the carl Orf is in full swing here,
and things that are beginning to feel tragic.

Speaker 3 (01:07:16):
So the truck parks and uniformed men get out and
the man in the box again. He tries to signal
them for help, but they don't even look at him.
They unhitch the box from the truck and then it
is lifted away by a crane and transported to some
deeper part of the facility, and the man becomes increasingly
terrified and desperate. He's banging on the glass from the inside,

(01:07:38):
but there seems to be no relief, and eventually the
box is transported into some kind of dark back room.
This big vast warehouse room where he is wheeled past
other telephone boxes, and here just the nightmare reaches its apex,
where he looks into the other telephone boxes and there

(01:08:00):
are just dead men inside, dead men dressed like him,
in various states of decomposition, looking like they've been in
there for years or even decades. And finally he is
parked next to one where a guy appears to have
strangled himself with the cord of his own telephone receiver.
The last image we see of the man is of
his hand pressed up against the glass. Is he's just

(01:08:23):
I guess, sinking down to the floor in despair? Ending
doesn't get much darker than that.

Speaker 2 (01:08:32):
Yeah, there is no escape. That is the final statement
here that we do get a little bit of a
stinger that reminds us don't worry, there's more doom to come.

Speaker 3 (01:08:45):
That's right. So we see a clean, tidy, new telephone
box being deployed in the plaza, once again, just waiting
for the next person to step inside. Wow. So that's
the end of Lacabina. But several things I think I
want to talk about because it raises all these interesting ideas.
One is within the movie, did you ever detect any

(01:09:09):
hint about what the point of the human harvesting operation was, Like,
why are people getting trapped in phone booths and stashed underground?
I'm almost certain this is intentionally left unanswered by the film.
But did you pick up on any clues that I missed?

Speaker 2 (01:09:25):
No, I mean, I think it's left ambiguous. I think
if I were to supply, I think my own sort
of headcannon for what's happening here is that just like
some sort of uncorrected accident of design, and the overall
view of the corporation and or the government and anyone
involved is like, well, these things happen. It's unavoidable. There

(01:09:46):
are tragedies and horrors baked into modern civilization, and I'm sorry,
we can't really address these design flaws. It is what
it is. I'm sorry it happened to you, or at
least I feel obligated to tell you so. And yeah,
that's that's what I got from it. I mean, I
guess you could lean into the idea that the boxes
are being put out there intentionally to catch and kill

(01:10:07):
middle aged men in Madrid, But I like the idea
that this is all just an accident of design and
it's just not going to be corrected, not out of
maliciousness or not individual maliciousness, but just sort of like
the uncaring nature of the world.

Speaker 3 (01:10:24):
Well, bridging off of that, I guess to go beyond
the sort of in universe question of what these people
are supposed to be doing in the narrative, there's something
a lot of people have asked, which is, like, what
is the meaning of the whole story? Is Luckabina supposed
to be a metaphor for living under the Francoist dictatorship
in Spain? This is something lots of viewers have inferred.

(01:10:48):
I mean, I think it's quite reasonable to suspect that
about it. According to the director, the meaning was not
intended to be limited to that, so it's not any
kind of direct allegory, but instead it was generally about
a kind of confinement and unfreedom and the desire for
freedom of all sorts. However, I think it's very worth

(01:11:10):
noting that at the time of this film's production and release,
Marcero may have believed he had to say that that
he could not admit, even if it were a veiled
critique of Frank Wist Spain, that that's what it was However,
I think this issue is a little further illuminated by
a couple of quote quotes that Marcero gave that are

(01:11:33):
collected in that article in the Artifice magazine that we've
been talking about. So, for one thing, Marcero, speaking after
the film's release, said, quote, Jose Luis Garci and I
recognize that when we wrote the script, we were closer
to the world of science fiction and terror than any
political theme. We also realized that our story had many readings,

(01:11:54):
and that that was its richness and complexity. I would
say then that Lakabina is this a parable opened all
kinds of interpretations, and according to the sensitivity, culture, and
formation of each one, it will be interpreted in a
different way, and those multiple interpretations will always be valid.
And then, apparently, in an interview to Rtve in two

(01:12:16):
thousand and nine, looking back on the film, so this
was when he was much older, he said, quote, all
human beings have boxes that we have to get rid of.
There are boxes of the moral type, there are boxes
of the educational type, there are boxes of the mental type,
economic boxes that imprison us. And I believe that life
is a continuous quest for freedom from each one of

(01:12:37):
these boxes. In order to be free, spontaneous, and happy,
each person has to see which box imprisons him and
try to free himself. That is our destiny. So, according
to Mrcero himself, a political interpretation is not the only
intended meaning, and I certainly don't think it's the only
valid interpretation of the film. But I also looking at

(01:12:59):
it and knowing a bit about the history, I would
have to say it's certainly a reading that makes sense,
especially in the way that it locks with other themes
that are clearly there in the story. So there's this
theme of unfreedom, but it also the theme of unfreedom
connects to the theme of dehumanization, which is a core
element of first the comedy and then later the horror.

(01:13:23):
This thing we see over and over is that the
man stuck in the phone booth is not being treated
as a human being by those outside the booth. He
gets mocked, he gets gawkeed at like just some amusing object.
He gets absurd, nonsensical orders barked at him by the police,
like things that would be impossible for him to comply with.

(01:13:43):
People that do try to help him, most of them
don't actually seem all that sympathetic to him. They're just
like it's like a way to show off their strength
or skills to the gathering crowd by getting the door open.
And then eventually the man gets shelved inside an underground
bunker to apparently die, with no one at any point

(01:14:04):
other than maybe like the kid on the road, and
maybe the circus performers seeming too much notice his humanity,
like his pain, his dignity, his desire for freedom, his
requests for help. It's really like, once he is stuck
in the box, he is not a person anymore. And
so despite the film's extremely bleak and horrifying ending, I

(01:14:27):
think it actually functions as a rather humane and emotionally
powerful warning against participating in that kind of dehumanization, either
as a spectator or as a functionary of an institution
stacking telephone boxes full of people underground. Like the person
stuck on the other side of the glass is a
human being, and tomorrow or the next day, maybe it

(01:14:50):
is you according to this story, and so we've got
to treat that person as a human being. The fact
that they're stuck in the box isn't funny, and it
isn't meaningless. It matters.

Speaker 2 (01:15:00):
I think it would be easy to watch this film
and just be left with a feeling of like, well,
people will do what they can and what they have
to do in order to help you, but beyond that,
they won't. And you know that. It's not to say
that the safety net of society and government is a
complete illusion, but it will only get you so far.
I guess where it challenges us and where you can

(01:15:21):
get into that idea of the film ultimately being about
freeing yourself from your boxes and all is by realizing
that we don't have to be like the people in
this movie, like this is a cautionary tale, Like we
don't have to live in a society, in a culture
that views the suffering of other in the predicaments of

(01:15:43):
other people like this.

Speaker 3 (01:15:45):
That's right. And so I think that that's one reading
on which this weird, absurd, little horror short film actually
becomes quite powerful. Like it's not just there to kind
of chill you an innertain you. It's rather meaningful and
it kind of puts a lesson in there that I
think it's hard to forget. But I do want to

(01:16:06):
acknowledge also that that again, that's not the only reading
of it. People have interpreted this to mean all kinds
of things, and so you know, there's what the director
said about it himself, is this general like free your
mind sort of thing. There are also all these weird
other readings that came up in some of the articles
we looked at. The one in the Artifice mentioned some
people at the time apparently thought it had something to

(01:16:27):
do with alien abductions. I don't get that much at all,
but people take it all over the place.

Speaker 2 (01:16:34):
Yeah, and they leave it open, and so you know,
all interpretations are valid. All right. Well, there you have it.
Nineteen seventy two's La Cabina the telephone Box, I say,
still more of a downbeat film compared to last week's Quest,
but they do have some things in common, Like they
are both films, both short films about liberation or the

(01:17:00):
for liberation, the desire for liberation. Whether that liberation is
actually achieved within the runtime or not.

Speaker 3 (01:17:05):
I guess it is up to us to imagine the
sequel to Lacabino where the where the telephone box regime
is overthrown.

Speaker 2 (01:17:12):
But can you imagine if someone did a feat I
think I've seen that kind of thing done before, where
there'll be like some sort of a short, like perfect
treatment of an idea. But if you expanded out into
a feature, you've got to you've got to add all
these elements that kind of take away the bite of
the original piece. You know, you'd inevitably have to have
that escape and perhaps some explanation of what's going on,

(01:17:35):
and I think a lot of that would fall flat.

Speaker 3 (01:17:37):
Yeah, best to leave that victory to the imagination.

Speaker 2 (01:17:40):
All right, We're gonna go and close up the episode here,
but we'd love to hear from everyone out there. Had
you seen the telephone Box before, what did you think
of it? What kind of an impact did it have
over you? Or are you like us new initians into
the mysteries of the telephone box? If that is the case,
we want to hear about that too. And if you
have any reck mandations for other thirty minute films that

(01:18:02):
feel like a perfect fit for Weird House, we would
love to entertain those suggestions. Also, I want to note
once more that we are really close to hitting our
two hundred film selection here on Weird House Cinema. We've
been receiving a number of suggestions for what we might
cover and we might not listen to any of those suggestions,
but we might. I'm very interested to read more of them,

(01:18:25):
so keep them coming. A reminder that Stuff to Blow
Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with
core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on
Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns
to just talk about a weird movie here on weird
House Cinema, and if you want to follow us on
letterbox dot com, our profile name is weird House and

(01:18:45):
there is in fact a list of all the movies
we've covered thus far, and sometimes a glimpse ahead at
what's coming out next.

Speaker 3 (01:18:51):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
to topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:19:13):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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