Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask) (1972) * 1/2

Directed by:  Woody Allen

Starring:  Woody Allen, Lynn Redgrave, Tony Randall, Burt Reynolds, John Carradine, Anthony Quayle, Gene Wilder

This is one of the few Woody Allen films I hadn't seen and I'm shocked by how little of it is funny.     I can't review a film and pretend that I'm watching it in 1972 when the film was first released.      Back then, some of this material may have been risque and challenging.     People may have laughed hysterically at a giant naked breast terrorizing a neighborhood.      Now, we could probably watch something similar to that on YouTube, although I'm not likely to laugh any harder.

Everything.... was made by Woody Allen during the years when he made farces and comedies that owed more to The Three Stooges than Ingmar Bergman.    They were funny to be sure.     With Love and Death and then Annie Hall, Allen transitioned to the diverse director of drama and romantic comedy.     However, Everything.... isn't very funny.     Allen tries manfully and pours a lot of energy into the process, but it is for naught.     Where did it go wrong?

The film is divided into chapters, covering topics brought up in the best-selling book it was based on.     The most amusing chapter covers sodomy, in which Gene Wilder's Dr. Ross falls in love with a sheep.      Wilder pulls this off mostly due to deft comic acting as a man who succumbs to his passions at great detriment to himself.      It is not every day you see a man checking into a hotel room with a sheep in his arms.     Allen himself stars in four of the chapters, playing a court jester who tries to nail the queen (played by a fetching Lynn Redgrave), an Italian man who can't get his wife to orgasm, a reporter who stumbles on to a maniacal doctor performing sexual experiments, and as a reluctant sperm.     None of these chapters are as comical as they sound.

Perhaps the issue is Allen was adapting another writer's work, and Allen is among the most original comic minds around.      Being pigeonholed by someone else's material isn't his bag.     We don't get a real sense about how he views all of this.    The other two segments involve an old man who is a transvestite and a game show hosted by Jack Barry concerning people's fetishes.     These two segments in particular drag on very, very long with little payoff, although if were ever interested in seeing what Regis Philbin looked like as a 40ish man, here is your segment.

I'm not certain if the original book was meant as a comedy, but that was how Allen adapted it.     My guess is the book and Allen's film are a million miles apart.     And I will never look at fettucine alfredo the same way again.     You will see what I mean if you choose to view the movie.