The Telephone Book

1971 sex comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A woman becomes enamored with an obscene phone call virtuoso because "he has class," and tries to find him. 

It's hard to believe that this--sort of a more avant-garde and more modern Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Sex But Were Afraid to Ask--is the only film Nelson Lyon directed. In some ways, it mirrors the free-love hippie generation and the more playful avant-garde offerings of the middle chunk of the 20th Century, but I really enjoyed its style, its absurdist humor, and the black and white cinematography. It takes some raunchy risks and has an unusual but somehow still workable mix of goofballery and seriousness. The performances are good because nobody in this plays the verbal slapstick too slapsticky. The main character, played by a waifishly cute and frequently-nude Sarah Kelly, does have maybe the most annoying voice ever but some great wallpaper. The obscene caller, Norman Rose, has one of those great voices, one of those mellifluous voices like Ken Nordine or somebody who you could listen to reading anything all day and never really tire of it. The calls themselves lean toward the absurd, like a lot of the humor, and when we eventually get to see Norman Rose, he's wearing a silly pig mask that covers the top half of his face. He really puts on a performance here, but that's probably easy when you've got great lines like, "They say that I could seduce a fire hydrant if it had ears." The narrative probably takes up around a half an hour in this as random interviews with other obscene callers or various diversions interpose. There's the former obscene caller who used to call nuns after dipping his hands in pea soup but doesn't do it anymore because of the rising of Atlantis, and there's another guy with a pipe who says, after just the right pause, "My mother never let me smell her pants." He's also the guy who talked about swallowing a golf ball and having his nose run when he eats spaghetti and who eventually admits, "I know that it's sick to say dick-a-lick," a line that made me wake me wife up because I couldn't stop laughing. You know, because I'm a child. Other auxiliary characters Kelly encounters on this little journey of hers include Har Poon, a guy with Groucho glasses and a guy on the subway who has a weird way of exposing himself. The former ends up with about 9 or 10 naked women on top of him, including my two new favorite actresses. Geri Miller plays a dancer who engages in something I'd describe as advanced twerking, and it's something special. Special enough that I want to find myself all 17 of her movies in which she plays Girl Shaking Tassels, Girl in Bar, Dancer, Woman being Whipped, Gerri the go-go dancer, and Dominique in something called Daughters of Lesbos. And Ultra Violet (not her real name, by the way) plays "Whip Woman," a woman with a whip. I also liked a very small role by some guy as a giggling mugger. Kelly also meets a flasher, a lasciviously-mustachioed guy who draws pictures for a perverse Rorshach test and who later pays her to tell a story by masturbatorily ejecting change from one of those old change dispenser things he's wearing on his belt. And that story is about a guy with an enormous, apparently perpetual erection who just happens to be shane-movies favorite William Hickey! And let me tell you--if you've ever wanted to see a William Hickey sex scene, this is your movie. Hickey gets great lines during that--"I think that something fabulous is about to happen" and "I'm scared"--and it was more than enough for the flasher's great "Wow!" as he ejected those coins to be echoed by my own. Anyway, there's lots to see here, and with all the slurping and panting and gurgling and slurping sound effects, there's even a lot to hear. It's all absurdly funny. However, there is a sort of sex scene that takes place in a pair of phone booths that was a really cool, and almost touching. Of course, it was juxtaposed with these surreally animated obscenities, like rejects from Pepperland engaged in coitus. Coolly dated and definitely worth seeing, even for those of you are ain't perverts.