The 60s school of improvisational comedy is beautifully preserved in Theodore J. Flicker’s film, which pits LBJ’s shrink (James Coburn) against a plot for world dominance hatched by TPC (The Phone Company). The vague, shapeless paranoia of the period—a liberal distrust, rather than a radical disgust—is well conveyed through a series of barely connected skits, the undoubted highlight of which is a dead-on parody of the Bell Telephone educational films we were all subjected to in grade school. Flicker’s technique is too flashy at times, but that, too, now seems a charming souvenir of the film’s era. With Godfrey Cambridge, Severn Darden, and Will Geer (1967).
