Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex *But Were Afraid to Ask (1972)

Woody Allen's 1972 anthology, loosely derived from David Reuben's bestselling volume of pop sexology, arrives as seven vignettes stitched together under a title long enough to exhaust a marquee. There is a jester, a chastity belt, a sheep, a game show called What's My Perversion?, a runaway breast the size of a barn, and a mission control center inside a man's brain dispatching sperm in white uniforms. The film grossed eighteen million dollars against a two million dollar budget and finished among the year's top earners, which tells us something about 1972 that we may not wish to examine closely.

For the purposes of classification, the ledger comes back empty. Every column reads zero. The cast is white and the ethnic jokes are punchlines, so representation is not a project here. The vignette asking whether transvestites are homosexuals treats cross-dressing as a parlor gag, the reverse of anything resembling affirmation. Women exist to be ogled or to serve as the setup for a punchline about public orgasm. Race, class, climate, and the inner life of the neurodivergent go unmentioned. Bodies are props. History is a costume rack.

None of this is a sermon. That is the curious part. The film has no thesis to press, no audience to correct, no lesson tucked inside the farce. It is anarchic, silly, and occasionally very funny, especially the Antonioni parody and the sci-fi finale. A picture can be crude without being preachy, and this one is. The classification stands at zero across the board, and the film seems entirely at peace with that verdict. It misbehaves, as the Cole Porter tune over the closing credits instructs, and it asks nothing of us afterward except perhaps a shower and a nap.