Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask)

The same year Francis Ford Coppola premiered The Godfather, Woody Allen directed this follow-up to the madcap shtick-fest, Bananas. Based, in name only, on the sixties sex self-help book, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask) is a series of seven vignettes that comedically covers taboo topics from aphrodisiacs, frigidity, ejaculation, and more. Apart from directing one of the segments in 1989’s New York Stories, it’s the only time Woody structured a movie as a series of isolated sketches. In addition, the film is a rare example of the director overtly basing a project off the work of another writer. “Allen has made his career primarily out of writing his own original ideas,” writes Mitchell Beaupre of Letterboxd. “But when book author David Reuben reportedly used one of Allen’s jokes from his previous film Take the Money and Run on Johnny Carson, Allen made the hilariously bitter decision to take Reuben’s book and make a film out of it in an act of revenge.”

Across the series of shorts, Woody parodies the subjects in Reuben’s book with varying degrees of success. “If Take the Money and Run was a satire on pop sociology, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex pokes fun now at pop sexual psychology,” writes critic Neil Sinyard. The most-successful stories of the bunch include a medieval court jester, played by what looks like a time-traveling misplaced Woody, attempting to seduce the Queen with deadly repercussions, a milquetoast doctor’s (played perfectly by Gene Wilder) bizarre but heartfelt love affair with a sheep, a scenario done completely in Italian between a man trying to defrost the cold sexual intimacy between he and his wife, and the personification of the inner-workings of a man on a date. What drags the movie down are sketches that might even illicit a few laughs but, overall, feel either half-baked or go on far too long. A send-up of game shows, What’s My Perversion, looks the part of a 60’s-era game show, complete with celebrity panel. But blink and you’ll miss it. The less said of the sketch with the cross-dressing man who is the victim of a purse-snatching the better. The largest tale in terms of scale includes Woody and a female companion joining a crazed researcher, a mix of Dr. Kinsey and Dr. Frankenstein, in his secluded mansion, culminating in a B-movie sequence as they fight off a monstrous mammary the size of a house.

Whether it was due to Woody’s rising popularity or the titillating title, Everything was his most-successful film at the box office, earning $18 million off a $3 million budget. Compare that to a movie like Bananas which earned about $3.5 million, domestically. Despite it’s success at the box office, critics seem to be interestingly divided on its good-standing in the Allen filmography. A Variety review of the film reads particularly scathing. “One of the episodes is a prolonged piece of nonsense involving a 2001-inspired mission control centre that is engineering a bout of intercourse in a parked car. Idea of Allen as a reluctant sperm may sound funny on paper, but it plays like an adolescent jape.” Meanwhile, film critic Emanuel Levy wrote, “By standards of mainstream Hollywood comedies, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know” was audacious, depicting, among other deviant phenomena bestiality, exposure, perversion, and S&M. The final scene, which takes place inside a man’s body during a hot date, is truly funny.” I happen to land somewhere in the middle.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex has never been my favorite Woody Allen movie, not even amongst his early zany stuff. While some of the sketches work better than others, the highlights such as Gene Wilder or Woody as a reluctant sperm cell and lovelorn Romeo with an exhibitionist wife are memorable and hilarious.