Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask

Woody Allen is sometimes regarded as one of America's more eccentric filmmakers, and his decision to acquire the film rights to David Reuben's sex guide "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)" must, at first sight, have seemed one of his more eccentric ventures. I mean, just how do you make a film of a sex manual, without turning it into pornography? Allen, however, clearly thought that the title was too good to resist, and his solution was to make the film as a series of seven sketches, a structure influenced by the Monty Python style of comedy. (The Python's first feature film "And Now For Something Completely Different", also made as a series of short sketches, had come out the previous year). Each sketch is given the title of a question from Dr. Reuben's book.

As with a number of films of this type (a later Python film "The Meaning of Life" being a good example) the individual sketches very enormously in quality. The good:- "What Happens During Ejaculation?". This seems to be the sketch that most people remember the film for. I am not sure whether there was any direct inspiration, but the central conceit, namely that the human body is actually controlled by small humanoid creatures living inside it, seemed very similar to that of "The Numskulls", a cartoon strip from a British comic. The sketch depicts what happens to the owner of the body during a sexual encounter with his girlfriend, and stands out for the contributions of Burt Reynolds as a brain cell and Allen himself as a sperm. The joke is that spermatozoa form a crack paratroop-style military unit who have sworn an oath to fertilise the woman's ovum "or to die in the attempt". They all have the sort of gung-ho personalities familiar from war films, all except Allen's character who is cowardly, nervous and self-doubting. (But then, what Allen character isn't?) The most brilliantly funny part of the film.

"What Are Sex Perverts?" This section, filmed in black-and-white, features a game show called "What's My Perversion?", an obvious parody of "What's My Line?". The humour comes from the incongruity between the mood of the show and its subject matter as the four panellists discuss in the cheerful, breezy tone typical of fifties and sixties game shows whether the seemingly respectable middle-aged contestant is a rapist or a voyeur. (It turns out that his perversion is "Likes to expose himself on a subway"). Some have criticised this sketch as tasteless, but a bit of tastelessness is needed for a film like this to succeed; no-one ever made a successful sex comedy by scrupulously observing the canons of good taste.

These, however, were the only segments that I really enjoyed. The indifferent:-

"Do Aphrodisiacs Work?", or the story of a mediaeval king's jester who attempts to seduce the queen, but is foiled by her chastity belt. Nothing particularly original in this, despite attempts to work in references to Shakespeare's Hamlet, but there is some humour to be derived from seeing the standard Woody character, the angst-ridden 20th century urban intellectual, transported back to mediaeval Europe.

Why Do Some Women Have Trouble Reaching an Orgasm?, which deals with a woman (played by Woody's ex-wife Louise Lasser) who can only become sexually aroused when making love in public. This section appears to have been designed as either a parody of, or affectionate homage to, the Italian cinema of the fifties and sixties, and is entirely in Italian with English subtitles. This struck me as a bit of a gimmick, although those who are more familiar than I with the back catalogues of Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini might find something to enjoy.

And finally the bad:- "Are the Findings of Doctors and Clinics Who Do Sexual Research and Experiments Accurate?" This was obviously intended as a parody of cheap fifties horror films, but Woody clearly had difficulty integrating this particular concept into his overall scheme of making a series of sketches on the theme of sex. The central character is, ostensibly, a Kinsey-style sexologist who turns out to be a Frankenstein-type mad scientist, complete with an assistant named Igor. The scenes of a gigantic breast bouncing across the countryside are a feeble attempt at surrealism, like something from one of the most contrived Python sketches.

"Are Transvestites Homosexuals?" and "What is Sodomy?" I bracket these two segments together because both share the same fault; neither is in the least funny. The first, predictably enough, is about a man who likes to dress up in women's clothes; the second, perhaps less predictably, is about a doctor who falls in love with a sheep. (In normal usage the word "sodomy" refers to anal sex, not to sex with animals; perhaps Dr. Reuben's book did not deal with the subject of bestiality). Perhaps in 1972, in the early days of the so-called sexual revolution, it seemed daring merely to mention areas of human sexuality which had previously been taboo.(It is impossible to imagine a mainstream Hollywood film of this nature being made in 1952, or even 1962). Woody seems to have imagined that all he had to do was to refer to these two subjects, without bothering to treat them with any wit or humour, for people to start laughing. That might have worked in 1972 (although I doubt it); it certainly doesn't work today.

Five bad or indifferent sketches out of seven is not a very good strike rate, but I have given this film an above-average mark, largely because I couldn't stop laughing at the "sperm" sketch. 6/10