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

Woody Allen wrote and directed this 1972 comedy, an anthology of seven vignettes that each take on a different question about human sexuality. The material is drawn from David Reuben's bestselling 1969 sex manual of the same name, and Allen answers its straight-faced advice with satire rather than instruction, turning the book's chapters into sketches about aphrodisiacs, sexual perversion, the male orgasm and other subjects many people would rather not raise in polite conversation. The segments move between court jesters, a lovesick shepherd, a television game show and a laboratory, with Woody Allen himself appearing in several roles, among them a court fool and a sperm cell. John Carradine, Lou Jacobi, Louise Lasser, Anthony Quayle and Tony Randall round out the cast, which runs to thirty-three credited performers.

The film followed Bananas, released a year earlier, and preceded Sleeper; it is the third of the forty-eight features Allen has directed in chronological order and the third he wrote. Charles H. Joffe and Jack Rollins produced. Made for about two million dollars, it returned roughly eighteen million worldwide, a strong result for an episodic comedy of its kind.

On IMDb the film holds a critics' rating of 7.3 from twenty-six reviews, while on TMDB users give it 6.5 from around a thousand votes, a narrower spread than the critics' figure might suggest. It runs eighty-eight minutes.