Wrong Number

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TELEFON

Directed by Don Siegel

Screenplay by Peter Hyams and

Stirling Silliphant

Out there in the gray, real world, the spies are doubtless still spying on one another, the professional assassins bumping each other off with depressing regularity. A little matter like detente is no reason for the espionage establishments of the world to change business habits that antedate the recent unpleasantness between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. What has dropped off since the cold war cooled down is public interest in these matters. To be sure, James Bond continues to prosper on the movie screen, but only by becoming more outrageously campy each time out. His antagonists have become totally apolitical, more and more like those master criminals whose antecedents are to be found in turn-of-the-century pulp fiction. But the rest-- as far as movies are concerned -- is silence.

In light of all this, there is something brave, if conceivably self-destructive about Telefon, which might have been subtitled 'The Last Spy Picture Show." Its creators do not attempt to palm off their Manchurian Candidate plot as something ripped from today's flaming headlines. The gimmick-- a group of Russian deep-cover agents in the U.S. are mind-conditioned to sabotage military targets when they get a phone call repeating a triggering phrase-- is seen from the start as a forgotten pre-detente plot that an unreconstructed cold warrior (Donald Pleasence) manages to set in mo tion a decade too late.

This is terribly embarrassing to Soviet intelligence. Charles Bronson is the secret agent dispatched to clean up the mess before it spreads too far; Lee Remick plays the double agent who is supposed to assist him but whose real function is to fall in love with him while they try to head off Pleasence before he sets all the old agents' bells aringing. There are entertaining possibilities in this improbable story. At least it avoids being paranoid, not only about the KGB but also, more remarkably, about the CIA, a more recently fashionable whipping boy. But Director Siegel, who is usually good at this sort of thing, doesn't generate much pace or suspense. There is nothing very interesting about the major characters either, a condition that leads Bronson to increase --if that's possible-- his normal stolidity, while Remick succumbs to an attack of perkiness. Instead of winding tighter and tighter, as a suspense story should, Telefon just winds down, rather like -- come to think of it-- a phone call between two people who don't really have much to say to each other.

-- Richard Schickel

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