"Appointment by Telephone" is a simple early comic sketch by Edwin S. Porter (director of "The Great Train Robbery" and America's most important filmmaker from before D.W. Griffith). It consists of three shots and is a good example of the progress Porter was making in linking scenes together, as film-making gradually evolved beyond the format of a single shot-scene as a complete film, to the establishment of the story film. Often, a lecturer would describe and narrate a film to audiences, which would aid their initiation to and understanding of these more complex narratives.
The first scene shows a man inside an office; he makes an appointment by telephone and then leaves the room for his date. By his exiting of the room, an intelligible continuity is established between the first shot and the second shot. In the second scene, the man is seen arriving outside a restaurant. The transition between shots two and three also establishes good continuity and is even somewhat of a reverse angle shot. It's the interior view of the restaurant, as the man talks to his date. The comedy comes when his wife arrives and breaks up the date. Creatively, the wife is first seen in the background, through a window. She delivers a punitive, comedic ending to the events, which seems to have been a common finale to many early films, beginning with the Lumière film "The Sprayer Sprayed" (L'arroseur arose) (1895). From here, Porter made more ambitious pictures, such as "Jack and the Beanstalk" (1902), "The Life of an American Fireman" and "The Great Train Robbery" (both 1903).
According to Charles Musser ("Before the Nickelodeon"), this film was a remake of a two-scene Edison subject with the same title from 1896.