The Telephone Book

Who is John Smith? why....every man's deepest fantasy of course. As he utters at one point and which sums up this incredibly original and black-humored ode to left wing sexuality..."I have perfected the obscene call to the point where I could seduce the President, his wife and his family - but I have no political ambition!"

Poor old Alice, cute little Goldie Hawn wannabe and who is a couple of bra-sizes short of average intelligence, she decides to answer her telephone! Big mistake - it is the world's most experienced serially-obscene phone caller. Does she care? No, she falls in love with him. She must embark now on the ultimate sexual odyssey to discover the joys of true spoken obscenity.

This film is unlike anything else ever made - as original as ERASERHEAD, as meaningless as an Osmond Brothers album. You have to see it...if for no other reason to witness Barry Morse's cameo to end all cameos. They surely COULDN'T have paid him to do it...he MUST have paid them!

I have had this film for twenty years and STILL haven't let my kids see it! I think mine is the only copy in Australia, if not the southern hemisphere. A deep deep underground film that could NEVER have found theatrical release I imagine.

This underground NYC film does seem intent on stimulating its characters and audience into a frenzied state, even though nobody ever gets around to actually *having* sex. This "story", if you can call it that, deals with various sorts of extremely kinky and twisted fetishes and how one particular person can only ever do his best work over the phone. Certainly the actors give it their all, and writer / director Nelson Lyon makes this a very odd duck of a film. It's often quite surreal, with some priceless dialogue and one monologue near the end that goes on for quite some time. The film is very well shot in black & white by Leon Perera, and is episodic in nature, as our main character meets a couple of quirky people and the basic story is frequently interrupted by "obscene callers" speaking into the camera and telling us what they do (or have done) to get off.

Adorable Sarah Kennedy stars as Alice, a sex-obsessed and air headed hippie chick who receives the obscene phone call of a lifetime. Impressed by the mans' talent, she embarks on a search for the guy throughout NYC. Among the characters we meet on this journey are an avant garde adult filmmaker (Barry Morse), an excitable analyst (Roger C. Carmel) who pays her in coins for details about her sex life, and a lesbian housewife. Finally, she meets the awe- inspiring "Mr. Smith" (Norman Rose), who prefers to keep some sense of mystery about himself and never takes off his pig face mask.

What's amusing is seeing a couple of very familiar faces turn up in this thing: Jill Clayburgh as "Eyemask", Ultra Violet as a woman with a whip, William Hickey as the guy in the bed, Lucy Lee Flippin and Dolph Sweet as two of our obscene phone callers, and "Captain" Arthur Haggerty as the district attorney. Kennedy is a reasonably good anchor in this tale, while Rose invests the nutty Mr. Smith with quite a lot of gravitas.

As you can see from what I've described here, this may not appeal to all devotees of adult entertainment, but the colour animated sequence late in the film sure is a marvel of cartoonish dirty imagery. However, people may still come away from this feeling dissatisfied. Judge for yourself.

Seven out of 10.

A film that I think aims to get the audience into a state of sexual ecstasy. There's no point to the plot nor is there a message. It's all about sexual fantasies. Nobody in the picture actually has sex, they just talk dirty and that's how they get off. Even when the young Goldie Hawn look-a-like main character meets her obscene caller he never takes off his pig mask and all he does is TALK sex. At many points when the sexual tension is at its height the movie cuts away to people talking into the camera about their habit of doing obscene phone calls or putting bananas into their vagina and so on, so I think it wants to play with the audience. The last 10 minutes it is piling it up, though. It gets louder and faster by the minute, and more animated. The movie certainly had an orgasm.

It's a very smudgy comedy, but barely funny. Kinda like a Russ Meyer picture but more experimental. There was an interesting moment at the theater. A guy on screen talks about his previous obsession of making dirty phone calls and it becomes more and more absurd but not particularly funny. Then the guy right next to me starts laughing out loud, and I mean really loud. He can't stop himself and goes "HA!" every few seconds. Gradually more and more people throughout the whole theater start laughing more or less because of what was on screen but they most certainly wouldn't have laughed if this guy hadn't started. When the next scene began it was all quiet again. There was close to no laughter throughout the rest of the picture.

The Telephone Book has developed a cult following over the years due to its pedigree (Nelson Lyon, a future writer of Saturday Night Live) and cast (William Hickey, Jill Clayburgh). However, it is still an early 70's softcore sex comedy, the type of film Something Weird Video specializes in. The plot has a young woman being so turned on by an obscene phone call that she attempts to track down the caller. This leads to encounters with all types of crazies as the woman wanders around Manhattan.

For what it is, The Telephone Book shows more imagination than most of its type. The film even includes an animated section where a giant woman has sexual intercourse with a skyscraper. This section and a housewife's dirty monologue about a banana are the only laugh out loud moments in the film. The rest of the jokes only slightly amuse (at best) . One is advised to view the film with expectations set by the genre and not by its cult reputation.

I didn't know of this obscure movie until I went on YouTube and discovered its trailer on it. It depicted a voice of a man who claims if he chooses to, he could seduce the president of the United States and his family! So I just watched the whole thing and it's quite weird what with some confessions of former obscene phone callers put in between the story of a young woman wanting to meet her obscene phone caller. It takes place in New York City during the early '70s in mostly black and white, only turning to color when an animated sequence comes on during a live-action sequence taking place in two phone booths. Oh, and there are early appearances of future stars like Jill Clayburgh. So on that note, The Telephone Book is one weird movie that's quite amusing if not completely hilarious.