No...Don't...

Anyone who has spent any amount of time with old movies, and I mean old movies, black and white gangster movies from the 30s and 40s, the Warner Brothers' gangster movies, with Jimmy Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Pat O'Brien, George Raft, et al. knows about the phone booths.

In the era depicted in these movies, most people didn't have telephones. There might have one at the base of the stairs in the rooming house they were staying in, the one run by the nosy old lady whose house you were in, and therefore implicitly giving permission to being spied on, And she did.

A public phone booth was an actual structure where one could go in, sit down on a small seat, close the door, look up a phone number in the directory if it was still attached to the chain, and make a call, usually for a nickle, and eventually for a dime. Drug stores all had phone booths. Drug stores were the 7 Elevens of the era. They stayed open all night. They had a lunch counter and a soda fountain. You could eat there, have ice cream desserts there, and get prescriptions filled there. You could buy toiletries and Westclox alarm clocks. They were the original 24/7.

Now in a gangster movie there is always someone desperate to make a call. Luckily, they usually have the right change to do this, so they scoot into a drug store phone booth, never even bothering to sit down, they are so desperate to make that call.

There are those who don't want this person to make that call. "Drop that dime" on them and finger them for the job they just pulled, providing the DA with just the right amount of testimony that will result in their going to prison. They don't want this, so they fire a Tommy gun at the drug store window through which you can see the phone booth and the caller. It's curtains for the caller. The line goes dead, and so do they.

You might think with the disappearance of phone booths this scene would disappear from movies and TV shows. No. Last night on 'Homeland' we got the updated version when Carrie alerts the authorities to a house in Queens (an outer borough of NYC that the writers actually found, unlike the the NYT) that was being used as a black ops staging area and where there was a significant piece of evidence, a van parked in the garage.

There are police and FBI agents all over the place, inside, outside; there are other high-level government types as well; the Solicitor General is somewhere, and Carries needs to find him again.

She goes outside and there are a pair of agents ready to take a bolt cutter to a padlock on the garage door to get it open.

Now, the house has just been occupied by a team of men who are the equivalent of a Navy SEAL 6 Team. They know every aspect of commando warfare. They know about weapons, ammo and bombs. They are dangerous bunch if left to their own devices, and a device is just what they left behind on that garage door.

Carrie of course quickly sees the padlock, sees the bolt cutter work though the steel loop, sees the agents reach for the door handle to pull the door up when she yells to stop, "No."

A bomb causes more damage than a Tommy gun through the window, but the result is the same. Death. But not Carrie of course, or Quinn, who were just outside the blast radius.

Didn't those guys with the bolt cutter watch old movies?

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