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Bells Are Ringing is a 1960 romantic comedy-musical film directed by Vincente Minnelli.
Based on the successful 1956 Broadway production by Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Jule Styne, it focused on Ella Peterson, who works in the basement office of Susanswerphone, a telephone answering service, where she listens in on others' lives and adds some interest to her own humdrum existence by adopting different identities for her clients, including an out-of-work Method actor, a dentist with musical yearnings, and playwright Jeffrey Moss, who is suffering from writer's block and desperately needs a muse. Adding complications to the plot are the police, who are certain the business is a front for an "escort service," and the owner's shady boyfriend, who unbeknownst to her is using the agency as a bookmaking operation.
Judy Holliday and Jean Stapleton reprised their stage roles for the film. The cast also included Dean Martin, Eddie Foy Jr., Fred Clark, Frank Gorshin, Bernard West, Hal Linden, and Gerry Mulligan.
Bells Are Ringing was the final musical produced by MGM's "Freed Unit", headed by producer Arthur Freed, which had been responsible for many of the studio's greatest successes, including Singin' in the Rain, An American in Paris and Gigi. The film also proved to be the last for Holliday.
Comden and Green won the Writers Guild of America award for Best American Musical. Together with Styne, they shared a Grammy Award nomination for Best Soundtrack Album or Recording of Original Cast from a Motion Picture or TV. Minnelli earned a nomination from the Directors Guild of America.