Every time I see a classic movie (when the telephone was already invented), and for some reason it's taking place outside in the city, I never see those which make me curious if they actually existed back then, or some other technology made it possible to make phone calls.
No. Telephone poles are a relatively recent addition.
When telephones were first rolled out there didn't exist an infrastructure to support them, particularly in rural areas. Plenty of folks still remember party lines wherein service was provided to a group of subscribers rather than on an individual basis; this practice existed through the 1970s but was effectively outmoded by the 1980s.
However, in order for any telephony to exist there had to be a network of conductive wires across which signal could be sent. Seeing as how neither telephone poles nor buried wires were yet part of the infrastructure there was a distinct problem in reaching many of the more far-flung individuals who could make use of telephonic communication.
Contemporaneous to the invention of the telephone was the very real struggle to farm and ranch the western United States, and ranchers were having issues fencing in their properties; cattle would easily tear through standard fencing. As a result, in 1874 a patent was filed by a farmer from Illinois. In it, he proposed "a twisted fence wire having [a] transverse spur wire." By 1877 this was established practice; the western United States was made ranchable by barbed wire. Very shortly this led to the nation being crisscrossed by fencing.
As traditional land-based lines proliferated, it didn't take long before the lack of infrastructure became evident. Building towers and poles and stringing copper wire across the country was a massive (and expensive) task.
As it turns out, though, the nation already had such an infrastructure in place and didn't even realize it. By the mid-1900s farmers could buy easy, off-the-shelf, affordable kits to network their barbed-wire fences and turn them into telephone lines! This allowed telephones to spread, counterintuitively, more rapidly to rural regions than some urban ones.
In effect, while telephone poles as such didn't exist there was in fact a technology in place already and it was simply due for some creative repurposing. As a result, farmers became among the first adopters of the technology of telephones! It wasn't until the 1920s that this practice was phased out.
So, next time you're driving down a rural highway and you see a cattle fence, stop and think that in 1877 (when barbed-wire telephony started to reach widespread adoption) those miles of cattle fence would also soon contribute to the rapid growth of electronic communication in the US.
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