Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex - But Were Afraid to Ask (1972)
Directed by Woody Allen

Film Review

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) owes its title (but very little else) to a popular sex manual by David Reuben.  It is Woody Allen's third solo feature as a director and arguably his silliest, although the film was a massive hit on its first release in 1972.  If the 1970s was anything it was the decade of tacky sex comedies, the kind of film that would only ever be watched today by diehard masochists with absolutely no understanding of the word 'shame', but Allen's film - scattergun and puerile though it is for the most part - transcends this most pitiful of genres and just cannot help being hilariously funny.  This is Woody Allen before his artistic pretensions got the bet of him and he had no hang-ups about resorting to cheap gags for an easy laugh.  Unapologetically silly the film may be, but there's something rather endearing about this unceasing torrent of humour directed against the most mystical of taboos: sex.

Of course, what Allen is mocking is not sex itself but society's prurient attitude to sex, and if the film in any way shocks that is more a reflection of the maladjustedness of the spectator than of its author's failings as a commentator on human affairs.  At the end of his next feature, Sleeper (1973), Allen states that the only things he believes in are sex and death - the two aspects of human experience that we, both as individuals and a society, are incredibly reluctant to talk about, let alone make fun of.  If Woody Allen has achieved anything in his career it is to exorcise something of the lead-lined mystique and hypocrisy surrounding the most basic truths of our lives - admittedly, not always with the greatest of tact or subtlety.

To give it its due, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex is one the most successful attempts at a portmanteau anthology film made in the 1970s, and one of the few that was not confined to the horror genre.  The seven sketches that make up the film are about the right length and the gags are pretty evenly distributed among them, with enough diversity of style and subject matter to keep us interested even when things start to get a tad tacky.  Only one of the seven sketches falls completely flat (the one that crassly conflates homosexuality and transvestism) - the other six all have their moments of brilliance amid a deluge of gags that range from the truly appalling to the irresistibly funny.

First the foreplay.  Things get off to a cracking start with Allen self-mockingly cast as the world's unfunniest court jester.  His attempts to despoil his Queen (a surprisingly game Lynn Redgrave) look as if they have been plundered from a schoolboy's comic but the sight gags induce laughter despite their crudeness.  After this descent into juvenile smut Allen shows his more sophisticated side in what follows: a tender love affair between a respectable medical practitioner and an Armenian sheep.  Gene Wilder's one foray into full-on bestiality clearly did his acting career no harm, although what became of the sheep we shall never know.  One fears the worst.

The poseur in Allen comes out with a vengeance in the film's third vignette, extracting the urine in copious amounts from Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini with a tasteful parody of their more challenging (shall we say) work.  Allen makes a decent stab of passing himself off as Marcello Mastroianni, although his accent spoils the illusion somewhat (all of the dialogue is in Italian, or a fair approximation).  Here we have a grim foretaste of the self-consciousness that would creep into the director's later films, with arty camera angles and such like betraying a filmmaker's too obvious attempts to ape his supposed betters.

Allen makes up for the unmentionable middle section (what is so funny about a middle-aged man dressed up in women's clothing?) with a totally evil parody of the popular panel game show What's My Line? in which the panellists have to discover the fetishes of various respectable-looking contestants.  Looking like a poor quality TV broadcast of the 1950s, this unveiling of the unseemlier aspect of human sexuality makes you laugh and feel nauseous at the same time.  By this stage, Allen's lack of good taste has gone well and truly out of the window.

You have barely recovered from this merciless skit before you are thrown headfirst into another.  This time it is the B-movie genre that gets kicked in the unmentionables, beginning with what looks suspiciously like a send-up of a bad Ed Wood horror movie, complete with John Carradine parodying his mad scientist persona to death, and then ending as a totally unhinged parody of The Blob.  Carradine gets the best gag of the entire film: "They called me mad... But it was I who discovered the link between excessive masturbation and entry into politics!"  Now playing a sex researcher (who is surprisingly easily shocked by what members of his profession get up to in the privacy of their own underground laboratories), Allen gets to fulfil one popular male fantasy, being chased across open country by a rampaging giant tit (and not one of the avian variety).  The humour may be crass but the dialogue and the effects are on a far higher plane than those offered by the dodgy films that inspired this digression into outright insanity.

What Happens During Ejaculation? is a fitting title for the film's climactic instalment, in which mission control carefully guides a man's physical processes through a successful coitus.  No prizes for guessing that Fantastic Voyage was the inspiration for this round of unmitigated silliness, although the sight of Woody Allen as a sperm anxiously contemplating his future is some recompense for the slew of mechanically rolled out sex gags.  As far as climaxes go, it's a pretty limp affair, cheesier than the cellar of a French restaurant.  Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex is an enjoyably daft romp which has low and high points aplenty, but you wonder why Allen chose to put the segments in the way he did.  Surely, it would have made far more satisfying viewing if segments two (sheep love) and six (the giant breast) had come right at the end?  Or is that just me?

Film Synopsis

This helpful guide to sex will address some of the burning questions you have long pondered but have been too nervous to seek answers to.  In Do Aphrodisiacs Work? a court jester of the Middle Ages risks bodily dismemberment by his irate King when he attempts to seduce the Queen with a love potion.  He is thwarted by a chastity belt and not even the Queen's sense of humour can save him from the chopping block.  In What Is Sodomy? an Amernian shepherd consults Dr Ross with a matter of some delicacy: his sheep Daisy has inexplicably fallen out of love with him.   Ross insists on seeing the sheep and he is at once smitten with her.  As he is swept away on a tide of romantic passion Ross loses everything, even the woolly object of his desire.  In Why Do Some Women Have Trouble Reaching an Orgasm? an Italian playboy is upset that his beautiful wife is unable to reach a climax in bed with him.  It turns out that he can only hit her G spot whilst making love in public places.  In Are Transvestites Homosexuals? a happily married middle-aged man harbours a naughty secret: he gets a thrill from dressing up in women's clothes.  When his wife discovers this terrible secret she forgives him, convinced that therapy will save their marriage.  In What Are Sex Perverts? genial Jack Barry hosts a television panel show called What's My Perversion? His contestants include a man who likes to expose himself in subways and a rabbi whose fantasy is to be bound and whipped whilst his wife eats pork.  In What Are Sex Researchers Actually Accomplishing? Victor, a leading sex scientist, accompanies reporter Helen Lacey on a visit to the maverick researcher Dr Bernardo, who has been conducting unspeakable sexual experiments in his secret laboratory.  Appalled at what they see, Victor and Helen narrowly escape with their lives but end up being pursued across country by a gigantic woman's breast that kills anyone it touches with its deadly lactic excretions.  In What Happens During Ejaculation? a dedicated team of miniaturised scientists in a man's brain have their work cut out as they control the physical processes that will ensure a successful climax during intercourse with a university graduate.  As the sperm await their moment of glory with trepidation, engineers are working flat out in the man's bodily organs to maintain arousal.  Their efforts are undermined by a priest representing the man's conscience.