Telephone Time (TV Series) Stranded (1957) User Reviews

Not the sort of Bette Davis TV show you'd expect.

[planktonrules · 7/10 · 24 May 2017]

Bette Davis stars in this episode of "Telephone Time". She is a school teacher in a rural Minnesota school. However, a storm is brewing and she and five children are trapped inside the school. She tries to keep the kids' spirits up but she realizes that eventually she may have to take the kids on a trek through the woods to safety, as the power is out and the school is awfully cold. But considering it's a blizzard, this is a bit risky and there is a chance they could all become human popsicles.

This is a very unusual sort of TV show for Miss Davis. I am not saying she's bad in it...but it's also a job most folks could have done and doesn't exactly help her show off her magnificent acting skills. Still, it is entertaining and worth a look...and it's currently on YouTube if you want to give it a try.

Bette Davis, the calm in the storm.

[mark.waltz · 8/10 · 7 January 2016]

While Bette Davis didn't make any feature films in 1957, that doesn't mean that she didn't want to work. When the studios didn't call for a good film role, she'd turn to the new medium of television to keep her face in front of the public eye, or head to New York for limited Broadway runs.

In this half hour episode of "Telephone Time", one of many television anthology shows of the time, Davis returned to the world of teaching, which she had done earlier in "The Corn is Green". The previous year, she had played a strong-willed librarian in "Storm Center" where she befriended a young boy fascinated by reading.

Here, she is a grade school teacher stuck in the small one room schoolhouse with her students during a horrendous blizzard. A brisk but detailed teleplay, she plays a truly compassionate woman in fear for herself as much as she is for her charges, but not willing to show that, she turns the disaster into an adventure.

There is no snarling in Davis's subtle performance, just the quick cropped delivery that had recurred in the 1940's, disappeared in "All About Eve", and pretty much remained for the rest of her career. Davis would continue to work in T.V. for the remainder of her career, and this is one of her highlights.

An epic blizzard

[bkoganbing · 6/10 · 13 September 2020]

A year before this half an hour teleplay aired on Telephone Time, Bette Davis played a schoolteacher who was pilloried by the community in Storm Center for the big screen. In this short film Davis dons the schoolteacher role again, but this time she's saddled with the awesome responsibility of keeping safe and warm five children at a rural one room schoolhouse.

It's also Minnesota and there's an epic blizzard approaching and it hits hard when it comes. Davis does a fine job in conveying the scope of the problem she is facing. Curiously enough a lot like John Wayne and what he dealt with with his crew in Island In The Sky.

John Nesbitt's voiceover narration tells of the outside world, but Davis with minimal dialog really dominates this shprt teleplay.