I don’t know that most people decide what podcasts to listen to based on which are most “useful” to them, but I still want to report that Justin LaLiberty’s guest episodes on Brian Saur’s Just the Discs Podcast are the most useful the medium has ever been to me. Shortly before every Vinegar Syndrome flash sale, Saur will interview LaLiberty (longtime Letterboxd champion and current Director of Operations for VS partner label OCN Distribution) about what titles Blu-ray collectors should scoop up while prices are low. These conversations are always overflowing with great recommendations for high-style, low-profile genre films I would have never heard of otherwise, and it’s the kind of podcast I listen to with a notepad on hand. To that point, one title LaLiberty has repeatedly promoted on these Just the Discs eps is the 1971 sexploitation comedy The Telephone Book, to the point where purchasing it felt mandatory (especially since its softcore lewdness pretty much guarantees it’ll never land on a major streaming service). In general, Vinegar Syndrome has been particularly proud of this discovery & release, using it as a touchstone representative of the distro’s brand: vintage schlock & porno that has more cultural & artistic value than its reputation would suggest. Having now finally seen it, I totally get it. It’s a masterpiece of messy, sweaty, independent filmmaking – the exact kind of forgotten curio movie nerds are always hoping to rescue out of the bargain bin.
The Telephone Book is a freewheeling, semi-pornographic arthouse comedy about the divine art of dirty phone calls. It’s grimy, street-level New York City filmmaking at its most playfully absurd. Sarah Kennedy stars as an impossibly bubbly 18-year-old nymphomaniac who wastes away horny afternoons sweating alone in her NYC apartment. Her bedroom boredom routine is violently disrupted at the start of the film by an anonymous dirty phone call from a man in a nearby photobooth, who announces himself under the alias John Smith. Shocked that the call is the most satisfying sexual experience of her young life, she’s determined to track down the mysterious John Smith in the phone book listings, which guides her through a series of decreasingly satisfying sexual escapades around the city. The film quickly devolves into a sketch comedy format from there, with isolated performances from 1970s theatre powerhouses William Hickey & Jill Clayburgh standing out among the more generic perverts of NYC. Then, the momentum of the search for the phonebooth John Smith comes to an abrupt stop when he physically shows up at the scene of the crime, entering our nympho heroine’s apartment disguised in a pig mask. Most of the rest of the runtime is comprised of his explanation of how he got so good at making dirty phone calls, playing out like the killer’s confession at the end of a slasher. Then, he repeats the act that drove his victim insanely horny in the first place, melting down what remains of reality with the filthy sound of his voice.
The climactic dirty phone call is so ecstatically perfect that it cannot be convincingly depicted onscreen. Instead, scenes of the second phonebooth call are intercut with the pornographic images bouncing around in Kennedy’s head, illustrated as crude bathroom-graffiti sex cartoons and explosive warzone audio. The entire movie plays like a filthy collage in this way, right down to the graphic decor of our heroine’s bedroom, which looks like if the cut-and-paste wallpaper of Daisies was made entirely of porno mags (matching the general vibe of watching Věra Chytilová adapt articles out of Screw magazine). War photography stock footage illustrates John Smith’s confession of power & guilt as his demented madman ravings get lost in the weeds of fascist American militarism and simulated space madness. Cutaway interviews asking men why they make dirty phone calls to strangers recall the candid street interviews of Funeral Parade of Roses in their frequent plot disruption. I’ve seen a few American titles that share DNA with The Telephone Book‘s oversexed, anarchic satire (and I really mean just a few – particularly Bone, Putney Swope, and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?), but it’s all played with a tone & visual style that would feel much more at home in an artsy European film fest environment. I don’t know that anyone’s out there dying to see Al Goldstein’s cheesecake sexuality filtered through the collagey French New Wave sensibilities of Agnès Varda, but if you’re out there, there is exactly one movie that might hit the spot.
As a vintage sexploitation time capsule, The Telephone Book is most illustrative in how it turns phonebooths and phone books into fetish objects of its era, splashing them with the cold water of a dial-a-prayer 900 number service for counterbalance. Sarah Kennedy’s performance as a Sexy Baby archetype with a girlish voice & body but a monstrously voracious sexual appetite is also a marker of its time. At one point, she watches then participates in the filming of an orgy as if she were a child observing then entering a petting zoo, fascinated by but detached from the action. It’s difficult to say whether that characteristic was intended as pure macho fantasy or a pointed satire thereof, but it is undercut by the inclusion of Clayburgh’s more mature, jaded performance as her sultry bestie. Clayburgh exists only in phone calls with Kennedy, never bothering to take off her sleeping mask while receiving head or loading her revolver in bed, only removing it once the phone sex with John Smith heats her up to an unbearable degree. John Smith himself (a masked Norman Rose) is where the political satire of the picture creeps in and dismantles the entire illusion of the cutesy nudie cutie it could’ve been without him. His confession and repeated phone call in the back half are so brilliantly staged that they make you want to immediately start the movie over again to reexamine sillier elements you might have dismissed as smut & fluff in the opening stretch. That’s partly what makes it such an ideal movie to own on disc, the same way its psychedelic porno breakdown makes it an ideal Vinegar Syndrome disc in particular.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 