Telefon

Telefon is a Cold War thriller about a covert Soviet program whose agents were planted in the United States during the 1950s. These sleeper agents live ordinary American lives and do not know they are spies; their missions were implanted under hypnosis and can only be triggered when someone recites a line from a Robert Frost poem to them over the phone. When a KGB officer named Nicolai Dalchimsky steals the notebook containing their names and begins activating them, a series of attacks against military targets follows. Soviet authorities send Major Grigori Borzov to America to stop the sabotage and recover the list, and he works alongside a CIA agent, Barbara, to track down the people being awakened.

Don Siegel directed the film, the seventeenth of the nineteen features he made in chronological order, following The Shootist and preceding Escape from Alcatraz. Peter Hyams and Stirling Silliphant wrote the screenplay, and James B. Harris produced it for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Charles Bronson plays Borzov, Lee Remick plays Barbara, and Donald Pleasence plays Dalchimsky; Tyne Daly, Alan Badel and Patrick Magee appear in supporting roles. Running 102 minutes, the film holds a rating of 6.5 out of 10 on IMDb from around 6,800 votes, with a comparable 6.6 out of 10 on TMDB from a much smaller sample.