Gee, what a cast Woody Allen was (and still is) able to muster for his movies, even though none of them is paid blockbuster wages since Allen's movies tend to draw in a selective audience. None of his productions have performed like "The Sound of Music." Here we have too many recognizable faces to mention, but Burt Reynolds, Tony Randall, Lou Jacobi, and Gene Wilder were at the zeniths of their careers in the early 70s.<br /><br />It's an episodic movie, and each episode has its own title and is independent of the others. There are seven segments all together and their titles are as silly as the title of the book they were drawn from, David Reubin's "Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask." The best-selling book was a kind of "Sex For Dummies" and the movie dispenses with its contents entirely. Instead we get fantastic stories of Medieval Fools and giant mammae. Some of the episodes are parodies of established genres -- the horror film, the Italian sex comedy -- and one is a parody of television quiz shows.<br /><br />How funny is it? There is more within-episode humor than between-episode humor. That is, some parts of each skit are more amusing than other parts, but the total number of laughs is about the same for each skit.<br /><br />Some of the laughs don't require much of the viewer except a firm sense of the absurd. "Transvestitism" has Lou Jacobi trying on the dress of a woman at whose house he is a dinner guest, while Jacobi's wife and the hostess' family sit in the living room below, wondering what's taking him so long to go to the bathroom. He winds up crawling out the window and dropping to the sidewalk where his purse is stolen, passers-by stop to commiserate, and the police arrive and demand to know what happened. It's funny as hell to see a fat, bald, mustachioed guy like Jacobi prancing around in ladies' gear but it isn't challenging.<br /><br />Other gags, mostly buried in the dialog, demand a little more attention. In the Medieval sketch, Allen manages to introduce a parody (within a parody) of Hamlet's encounter with the ghost on the tower. Then, without any tidy explanation, he gets into Hamlet's soliloquy: "TB or not TB. That is the congestion. Consumption be done about it? Of cough, of cough." And later: "We'd better hurry up. Before you know it, the Renaissance will be here and everybody will be painting." If you don't find that worth a smile, you may be in the wrong ball park.<br /><br />I usually find the Giant Tit sketch more outrageous than the others. John Carradine is the mad scientist who is conducting experiments on subjects like, oh, premature ejaculation in the hippopotamus, and transferring the brain of a lesbian into the skull of a man who works for the telephone company, and who is inventing a forty-foot diaphragm, "Population control for an entire country -- all at once!" Carradine has a hunch-backed assistant named "Igor" who hobbles around and mumbles like Quasimodo. "I gave him a four-hour orgasm," Carradine explains. "Oh, he had fun -- but he turned out like this." The giant breast is the size of a zeppelin and is mobile, traveling around the countryside killing people by squirting them with Half and Half. It's finally captured when Allen lures it into a giant brassiere.<br /><br />I suspect Allen was taking advantage here -- more than he had before or since -- of the newly relaxed regulations regarding the depiction and discussion of sex and violence on the screen. It seems a little raunchy today. But it's good natured and should leave you in a better mood than you were in before you saw it.