Tudo o que Você Sempre quis Saber Sobre Sexo, mas Tinha Medo de Perguntar

Ever since the mid-70s, I have had a nostalgia for Woody Allen's early films. Everyone needs to grow, it's just that I think Woody has grown in the wrong direction. In the films that followed "Annie Hall" he seemed to be trying to be Bergman at times and Fellini at others, when I always thought he was better just being Woody. Why? Because he was funny, and this film is the funniest of them all.

This is Woody at his zaniest, his most anarchic, his most irreverent, his wildest. It is zany in the same sense that the Marx Brothers were at their height. He isn't afraid to have segments that are just plain crazy and unbelievable. I wonder if David Reuben realized that Woody was actually mocking his book when he sold the rights. A classic. 8/10

Everything You Always Wanted to Know... is frequently looked down upon as it fulfils its promise completely. That is, it contains a lot of sex.

To downplay the film on such a level is to do it a disservice: what may be overlooked is that, apart from the subject matter and the brevity with which such a topic is treated, this is shot extremely well.

A notable example of this is Allen's technique of having actors speaking with their backs to the camera. A very European style of filming, and one which, understandably, is most brought into play during the third vignette, a pitch-perfect satire of continental cinema. Also look out for the grand-scale surrealism that occupies the last two sequences: a 400-foot breast rolling down a well-shot hillside or a giant tongue may seem crude in context, but looked at solely for cinematic technique this is pure Fellini. This may seem to be overstating it, but never has a bawdy, slightly crass, comedy vehicle been so well conceived for the big screen. Even the opening sequence involving a multitude of white rabbits is shot with the screen in mind, a twitching nose and red eye the only objects punctuating an effective white counterpoint for the introductory credits.

And so to the content itself, which doesn't match the quality of the production and sags in the middle. The first three sketches are quite wonderful, the third, as mentioned, is exquisite, and the scenes with Gene Wilder romancing a sheep may not be as sophisticated, but are probably the funniest. The first sketch sees Woody as a medieval jester paraphrasing Shakespeare, though the gags really don't get any better (or more tasteful) than "T.B. or not T.B., that is the congestion". For this is a film that has no limits, and its content flirts with notions of bestiality, transvestism, the female orgasm, ejaculation and sex in public places. Not all of these are carried off particularly well, the transvestite sketch falling resolutely flat. There is also evidence of Woody's homophobia, casting himself as a sperm dreading being ejected during a "homosexual encounter". In fact, an eighth sketch was filmed, which suggested homosexuality arises as a direct consequence of fear of women. This was cut not on bounds of taste but due to the fact that Woody couldn't think of a good enough punchline.

Worst point of the film though, has to be the "What's My Perversion?" segment. While extremely satirical, this one leaves an extremely bad taste in the mouth as Woody seems to be going full-out to offend with this piece. While the basic idea could cause some amusement, seeing a panellist quizzing a contestant as to whether he's a rapist or a child molester is several stages beyond funny. Simarily, the sketch ends with a Rabbi's wife on her knees eating pork. An unnecessary addition to the film.

However, it is of importance in terms of Woody's screen "character". The rough edges, arrogance and pseudo-intellectualism of his mid-seventies work onwards has yet to emerge, and here we still have Woody very much as he was in "Casino Royale" - ie., a bit of a nerd and on the losing end of life. Amazing to think that in just two years time he was writing himself as a lothario who was exceptionally good in bed.

In conclusion, then, a worthwhile view if you're a student of film or a fan of Woody's, but if you're watching this one for the comedy then it's purely hit-and-miss.

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

In a series of sketches Woody Allen looks at aphrodisiacs, bestiality, cross dressing, perversions, sexual experiments and the functioning of the body during intercourse. All this answers key questions about sex that perhaps we were all to afraid to ask.

Woody Allen apparently just noted down all his comedy thought about sex and decided to make them into a movie. The end result is a strange beast – like sex it has bits that are fantastic and bits that aren't quite as fun but you gotta do them to get to the good stuff! The questions that are asked in subtitle are never actually answered and several times are barely relateable to the actual sketches themselves – so don't expect to learn very much but get ready for some laughs – but not as many as you'd hope.

Allen's comedies are either surreal quick fire comedies or witty plot based things. This is one of the former, or at least wants to be. Some of the sketches are very imaginative and very funny – what's my perversion, the experiment and the innerspace look at sex are all funny. However some others are mildly amusing or totally pointless (the cross dressing one doesn't really work).

That said it is still quite funny despite the lapses. The cast are good – but I wanted to see Woody more as the weakest sketches were without him and needed his influence. Faces like Lynn Redgrave, Carradine, Tony Randall, Burt Reynolds, Barry etc are all good but only really serve to distract.

Overall fans will enjoy this example of his `earlier funnier work' but for others they may find that too many of the jokes don't hit as hard as you'd want and some just plain misfire. The hits only just outweigh the misses but it's still work a watch.

An uneven early work of Allen's, really just a series of sketches tied around the unbelievable popularity of the "sex" book "Everything You Wantedto Know About Sex, But Was Afraid To Ask" which in the early 1970's was THE book in popular culture. Many of the sketches are too long and "peter" out, but ALL of them have very funny jokes and insight, but two of the sketches are classics and are as funny as anything Allen ever wrote: Gene Wilder's bit where he plays a man who is destroyed after a certain "fetish" is introduced into his life and the last sketch, where they show the inside controls of a man's body as he gets ready to have sex with a date: Burt Reynolds and Tony Randall help run the master control room. This is brilliant and clever. Some times it's refreshing to just go back to Allen's early, silly films like Sleeper and Take The Money And Run, even though the man has gone onto important funny films with deep dramatic throughlines: Crimes & Misdemeanors, Deconstructing Harry and Husbands & Wives.