Kritiken

Though this comes four years Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate in 1967, and even though those films were representative of the kind of direction Hollywood would take when it came to dealing with sexuality, The Telephone Book still transgressed boundaries that the Hollywood system was uninterested, or too afraid of, getting closer to.

Scattered throughout the narrative proper are a series of talking-head commentaries delivered by "recovering" obscene callers. These vignettes are pitch-perfect gems of absurdist monologue, seamlessly blending scripted dialogue with flashes of improvisation. The thrust of these speeches is to insinuate that what these people come up with to occupy their time, once they're cured of their relatively harmless fetish, is bound to be a whole lot worse.

The film works best when it pushes towards some near-Surreal moments or when Lyon's dialogue becomes most playful (Dolph Sweet's monologue, full of non-sequiturs and delivered straight-on deadpan is a highlight).

When The Telephone Book was made, Lyon was still a promising comic talent. His movie conveys a youthful enthusiasm and a curiosity about what can be done with film comedy.