Film Overview
Seven questions about sex become seven completely different comedies in one of Woody Allen’s most formally adventurous early films.
Inspired loosely by Dr David Reuben’s bestselling 1969 book, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) abandons the idea of a conventional adaptation. Allen instead takes questions associated with the book and turns them into a series of independent comic films.
The seven sections move through radically different styles. There is an Elizabethan comedy about a court fool and a chastity belt, Gene Wilder as a doctor who develops an impossible romantic obsession, an Italian-language parody of European cinema, a domestic story about cross-dressing, a black-and-white television game-show spoof, a horror film involving a deranged scientist and a giant breast, and finally an elaborate science-fiction journey inside the male body.
Woody Allen appears in four of the episodes, but the anthology format also gives substantial roles to Gene Wilder, Louise Lasser, Lou Jacobi, John Carradine, Lynn Redgrave, Anthony Quayle, Tony Randall and Burt Reynolds.
Each section is introduced by a question on a black screen. The opening and closing credits, meanwhile, play over images of hundreds of white rabbits accompanied by Cole Porter’s Let’s Misbehave.
My Review
Seven questions, seven different films
What I enjoy most about Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) is the sense that Woody Allen has suddenly been given permission to make seven films instead of one.
Take the Money and Run and Bananas were already restless films, moving rapidly from one comic idea to another, but this time Allen does not even have to pretend that everything belongs to the same story. The anthology structure allows him to start again every ten or fifteen minutes.
A medieval farce can be followed by Gene Wilder falling hopelessly in love with a sheep. That can be followed by an Italian-language parody of European art cinema, which can then give way to a black-and-white television panel show and eventually to a science-fiction control room inside a man’s body.
There is something wonderfully liberating about that. The connecting subject is sex, but sex is really the excuse. The film is much more interested in the different comic forms Allen can build around it.
The title came from Dr David Reuben’s enormously successful book, but the film has little interest in behaving like a serious screen version of a sex manual. Allen takes the question-and-answer structure and turns it into a framework for parody.
For me, that is the reason the film still has such energy. It is less about providing answers than about demonstrating how many completely different kinds of jokes can be made from the questions.
Sex provides the subject, but the real pleasure of the film is watching Allen discover a different cinematic language for almost every story.
The opening section, Do Aphrodisiacs Work?, immediately establishes the approach. Anthony Quayle and Lynn Redgrave inhabit an exaggerated Elizabethan world while Allen wanders through it as the Fool, speaking in his familiar contemporary rhythms.
That collision is the joke. Everybody around him appears to belong in a costume drama while Allen looks and sounds as though he has somehow been dropped into the wrong century.
The chastity-belt sequence is exactly the kind of physical comedy his early films did particularly well. A supposedly sophisticated subject is reduced to keys, machinery, panic and the practical problem of getting something open before the King arrives.
Allen also speaks directly to the audience, making the artificiality of the whole episode part of the fun. We are never expected to believe in the world. We are being invited to enjoy the collision of a Woody Allen comic persona with Shakespearean costume drama.
Then Gene Wilder arrives and the film changes completely.
The section usually remembered most clearly is What Is Sodomy?, and Wilder is the reason it works. The premise could hardly be broader: a respectable doctor gradually falls in love with a sheep called Daisy.
What makes it extraordinary is the seriousness with which Wilder plays it.
He does not signal the joke. He does not try to reassure us that he knows how ridiculous the situation is. Dr Ross behaves like the anguished hero of an impossible romantic melodrama.
That decision transforms the episode. The further the situation moves into absurdity, the more emotionally committed Wilder becomes. Diamonds, hotel rooms, jealousy, humiliation and eventual abandonment are played with the gravity of a doomed love affair.
It is probably my favourite section because it demonstrates one of the central rules of this kind of comedy: the actor must believe the situation much more completely than the audience ever could.
Gene Wilder makes an impossible joke work by playing it as though he has wandered into the saddest love story of his life.
The Italian episode, Why Do Some Women Have Trouble Reaching an Orgasm?, is interesting for completely different reasons.
Allen plays Fabrizio opposite Louise Lasser’s Gina, but now the comedy comes from style as much as dialogue. The characters speak Italian, the images are cooler and more composed, and the whole episode imitates the emotional distance and visual sophistication associated with contemporary European cinema.
Gina can only become sexually excited when she and Fabrizio risk being discovered in public. The premise is broad, but Allen shoots much of the episode with a visual seriousness that makes it feel almost like material borrowed from another director.
I particularly like this section because it shows Allen beginning to think more consciously about film style. He is no longer simply photographing jokes efficiently. The photography itself can become part of the parody.
That would become increasingly important. Sleeper would use the visual grammar of science fiction, Love and Death would play with Russian literature and European cinema, and later films would demonstrate just how important cinematography and formal imitation could become to his comedy.
Here you can see the idea beginning to take hold.
The fourth section, whose original title uses terminology very much belonging to its period, is quieter and more conventional. Lou Jacobi plays Sam, a married man who secretly tries on women’s clothes while visiting another family.
Compared with the episodes around it, the construction is almost traditional farce: somebody has a secret, discovery seems imminent, and the comedy comes from increasingly desperate attempts to avoid being caught.
Some of the language and assumptions have inevitably aged more than other parts of the film, but Jacobi plays the embarrassment with a vulnerability that keeps the episode rooted in character rather than simply costume.
The next section is one of my favourites visually.
What Are Sex Perverts? becomes What’s My Perversion?, a black-and-white parody of the television panel programmes of the period.
Jack Barry hosts while celebrity panellists attempt to identify the contestant’s particular sexual interest through a series of questions. The joke works because the programme reproduces the politeness, structure and professional cheerfulness of conventional television while the subject matter becomes increasingly outrageous.
It is another example of Allen understanding that form can do much of the comic work. If the exact same material were simply discussed by characters in a room, it would lose half its effect. Presenting it as television turns the contrast into the joke.
The anthology works best whenever Allen lets the style of another genre remain completely serious while the subject becomes absurd.
The horror-film episode pushes this idea even further.
Allen becomes Victor Shakapopulis, a researcher who visits the laboratory of Dr Bernardo, played by John Carradine. There is an Igor, an isolated mansion, forbidden experiments and all the machinery of a mad-scientist film.
Carradine is ideal casting because his presence instantly lends the parody a degree of genre authority. He does not need to explain what kind of film we are watching. The voice, face and manner do it for him.
The episode eventually produces one of the film’s most memorable images: a giant breast escaping from the laboratory and terrorising the countryside.
It is ridiculous, obviously, but I admire the commitment involved in actually constructing the thing and allowing the joke to become a miniature monster movie.
That sense of scale is important. This was a noticeably more technically ambitious production than Allen’s previous films. Production designer Dale Hennesy creates worlds that have to change radically from episode to episode, and David M. Walsh’s photography adjusts with them.
All of that preparation leads to the final section, What Happens During Ejaculation?, which is probably the film’s most complete marriage of concept, production design and performance.
We enter a control centre inside the body of a man on a date. Tony Randall is the chief operator, surrounded by technicians responsible for different bodily systems. Burt Reynolds is stationed at the switchboard. Woody Allen is one of the sperm waiting nervously for launch.
It is a wonderful concept because Allen turns sex into an industrial and technological process requiring hundreds of anxious employees.
Eyes provide visual information. Engineers attempt to maintain an erection. The conscience department interferes. The sperm prepare themselves like astronauts who may never return.
The influence of science-fiction films such as Fantastic Voyage and 2001: A Space Odyssey is obvious, but the parody is affectionate enough that the production design still has to work on its own terms.
Allen’s sperm is wonderfully frightened by the entire arrangement. He wants to know what is waiting outside. He worries about where he might end up. The heroic language of the launch sits perfectly against the character’s complete lack of enthusiasm for being fired into the unknown.
It is one of those early Allen ideas that feels completely silly and strangely logical at the same time.
The final episode turns the human body into mission control and makes sex look like the most complicated engineering project ever attempted.
The performances across the film are unusually strong for something built from sketches. Wilder is the obvious standout, but John Carradine, Tony Randall and Lynn Redgrave all understand that the funniest approach is usually to take the surrounding nonsense seriously.
Louise Lasser also fits Allen’s early comic world particularly well. There is an ease between them that allows the Italian section to move between stylised parody and much more recognisable relationship comedy.
Burt Reynolds has relatively little screen time, but his presence in the control room is one of those pieces of casting that becomes more enjoyable with time, particularly given how enormous his screen career was about to become.
I do not think every section works equally well, but that has never bothered me very much with this film. Anthologies almost inevitably produce favourites. Part of the pleasure is waiting to see what kind of film will appear next.
There are also moments that are unmistakably from 1972. Attitudes, terminology and some assumptions about sexuality belong very clearly to the period in which the film was made.
Yet the best material has survived because the comedy is really about embarrassment, anxiety, desire and the extraordinary amount of seriousness human beings attach to sex.
The opening use of Let’s Misbehave understands that immediately. Cole Porter’s song is sophisticated and playful at the same time, and the sight of hundreds of rabbits gives us the film’s argument before the first sketch has begun.
People may approach sex with theories, categories, research, embarrassment and endless questions, but Allen keeps bringing everything back to the absurdity of human behaviour.
That is why the book becomes almost irrelevant. The film is not interested in explaining sex. It is interested in what happens to people when they try to explain it.
Looking at Allen’s filmography, I also think this is an important bridge. Bananas had already shown how freely he could move between parody and narrative, but this film turns style itself into the organising principle.
One episode can look like Shakespeare, another like Antonioni, another like American television, another like a horror film and another like science fiction.
That confidence would matter enormously in what came next. Sleeper and Love and Death would both depend on his ability to enter an established genre and then dismantle it from inside.
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex feels like the laboratory in which many of those instincts were tested.
It is uneven, outrageous, occasionally dated and frequently inspired. More than fifty years later, the best sections still work because they are built around genuine comic ideas rather than simply the shock of talking about sex.
And whenever Gene Wilder looks at Daisy with complete romantic devastation, or Woody Allen prepares for launch dressed as a sperm, it is difficult not to admire just how far the film is prepared to follow a joke.
Cast and Characters
Woody Allen
Allen appears across four episodes, moving from Elizabethan fool to Italian husband, sex researcher and one extremely nervous sperm.
Gene Wilder
A respectable doctor whose encounter with a patient’s sheep develops into the film’s most famously improbable love story.
Louise Lasser
Fabrizio’s wife in the Italian-language episode, who discovers that danger and the possibility of being discovered are essential to her desire.
Lou Jacobi
A married man whose secret interest in wearing women’s clothes places him at the centre of one of the film’s more traditional farces.
John Carradine
A deranged researcher whose isolated laboratory turns one episode into a full-scale parody of classic mad-scientist horror films.
Lynn Redgrave
The object of the Fool’s dangerous affection in the film’s opening Elizabethan comedy.
Anthony Quayle
A formidable royal presence whose arrival creates considerable practical difficulties for Allen’s would-be seducer.
Tony Randall
The composed chief controller responsible for managing the body’s increasingly complicated sexual response in the final episode.
Burt Reynolds
A member of the internal control team in the film’s science-fiction finale, appearing the same year as his breakthrough in Deliverance.
Cole Porter provides the perfect invitation to misbehave
Mundell Lowe composed and conducted the film’s original music, but the piece that defines the soundtrack is Cole Porter’s Let’s Misbehave, heard over both the opening and closing credits while the screen fills with white rabbits.
Let’s Misbehave
Porter’s sophisticated invitation to abandon restraint is an ideal musical frame for the film. Played against hundreds of rabbits, it establishes the combination of elegance, sex and absurdity before the first question has even appeared.
The soundtrack changes whenever the film changes genre
Guitarist and composer Mundell Lowe wrote and conducted the original music, supporting a film that has to move between costume comedy, European parody, horror and science fiction.
The final control-room sequence uses The Battle Hymn of the Republic as the body prepares for its climactic launch, turning patriotic grandeur into another joke.
Allen himself also plays Red River Valley on harmonica while waiting nervously with the other sperm.
Mundell Lowe
Lowe composed and conducted music flexible enough to accompany seven episodes with radically different tones and visual styles.
Let’s Misbehave
The 1920s song accompanies the rabbit-filled opening and closing credits and gives the entire anthology its playful musical frame.
Battle Hymn of the Republic
The control-room workers sing the familiar melody as the film’s elaborate internal machinery approaches its objective.
Red River Valley
Allen plays the traditional tune on harmonica as one of the nervous sperm waiting to discover exactly where the mission will take them.
Locations
Unlike the New York identity that would later become inseparable from Woody Allen’s films, this anthology was produced in Southern California.
Los Angeles and surrounding areas provided the flexibility needed for a film that had to create medieval England, Italy, suburban America, a gothic laboratory and the inside of the human body within the same production.
Los Angeles
Los Angeles was the principal production base, with both location work and constructed sets used across the seven separate episodes.
Arden Boulevard
Arden Boulevard is among the identifiable Los Angeles locations used during production.
Agoura
The production travelled west of Los Angeles for additional location filming in the Agoura area.
Thousand Oaks
Thousand Oaks supplied further Southern California locations for a production whose fictional settings range far beyond California.
Awards and Recognition
A Major Early Success
The film earned more than $18 million in the United States and Canada from a reported production budget of around $2 million.
Seven Distinct Genres
The anthology allowed Allen to parody everything from European art cinema and television game shows to gothic horror and science fiction within a single feature.
Gene Wilder
Wilder’s completely serious performance as Dr Ross became one of the film’s most enduring comic achievements and his only appearance in a Woody Allen film.
An Early Experiment in Style
The film demonstrated Allen’s growing confidence in using cinematography, production design and genre imitation as essential parts of the comedy — an approach he would develop further in Sleeper and Love and Death.