MOVIE REIVEW: EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX* (*BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK) (1972)

One of the New Hollywood movement’s bona fide auteurs, Woody Allen has never been concerned about making a film for the masses. He knows what he wants to say and what it’s supposed to mean. Sometimes, that leaves audiences to speculate just what that is, because Allen isn’t one to just come out and say it. You can take his work at surface level, or you can try to decipher a deeper meaning from it. This film comes from early in his directing career, so it is more straightforward and for laughs.

Both inspired by the 1969 book of the same name, and parodying its contents, Allen presents seven vignettes about various sex topics. Each one takes a serious sounding question and presents a potential scenario falling under that heading with an absurdist twist. Your mileage will vary depending on how uncomfortable you are with the topic and the content of the skit itself. For my money, the ones that feature less or none of Woody Allen are funnier.

As a collection of shorts, this film’s quality is the sum of its parts. Even at this early stage, Allen casts himself as a romantic lead opposite a much younger and beautiful female actress in a skit about a medieval court jester giving the queen an aphrodisiac, only to be thwarted by the chastity belt the king makes her wear. There are literary references throughout but even a side order of intellectualism can’t improve the flavor of Allen as a supposed heartthrob.

Two of the boldest skits are titled What Are Sex Perverts? and What Is Sodomy? The former plays out as a game show, where a panel of celebrity guests try to guess each contestant’s fetish or perversion. The latter employs Gene Wilder’s subtle comedic chops as he portrays a therapist who sees a patient who claims to be in a relationship with a sheep from his flock. Wilder’s character eventually meets the sheep and begins a relationship with it himself.

Both of these vignettes are fully committed to the concept. The game show bit is complete with witty banter, audience applause, as if it were genuine game show that exists in a world where these topics are talked about without fear of reprisal. The sheep segment features consequences, but it is Wilder’s understated timing and mannerisms that win the day, especially when you have to consider how preposterous and difficult it must have been for him to work these scenes with a live sheep in the room.

The film closes with a clever bit about sperm preparing to be deployed. Allen plays to his type as a neurotic sperm cell with all kinds of doubts and fears about what he and the boys will find on the outside. Coupled with this is a hilarious command center crew featuring a young Burt Reynolds as a switchboard operator. It takes a simple unconscious bodily action and adds all kinds of silly complexity and humor to it.

More like the last skit might have made this film funny start to finish. But Allen tries to be clever in too many ways that either fall flat early or fail to sustain the amusement for the length of the vignette. There are flashes of brilliance, but as a sum of its parts, this film is only good enough at using the subject matter for laughs. I can see how it may have influenced later sex-focused comedies, but not enough to raise my rating for it.

FINAL RATING: 3 out of 5