(0052) Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)

August 13, 1972 | 1 week at #1

Seen by Martin before? Yes

What did I expect? A sketch movie by and with Woody Allen, with varying results.

What did I get? Comedy depends on surprise, so comedy tends to date. The problem is actually worse than that — since comedy has the effect of discombobulating our pompous, complacent selves, really potent comedies often make themselves obsolete. If a comedy does its job too well, it renders widely held pieties ridiculous and unimaginable, unfortunately denying to posterity the possibility of understanding why a given gag once possessed the spring mechanism needed to achieve its effects. As a buffet of morsels, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) hasn’t aged particularly well, but it was once a satisfying smorgasbord.

(0045) Play It Again, Sam

May 7, 1972 | 1 week at #1

Seen by Martin before? Yes

What did I expect? A stagy, early Woody Allen movie.

What did I get? I saw Play It Again, Sam when I was a teenager, and the experience did not leave me with a strong desire to see it another time. It seemed pretty stiff, and also just in purely visual terms it didn’t look very good, it was kind of hazy. I often wondered if my lack of enthusiasm was partly a product of my youthful status, a movie all about a man’s attempt to find a romantic partner not being likely to appeal to a young fan of the daffier Bananas or Love and Death. A second viewing establishes that my age was not the issue; it’s the same movie I remember.

(0026) Bananas

May 2, 1971 | 1 week at #1

Seen by Martin before? Yes

What did I expect? One of the best early Woody Allen comedies.

What did I get? One of the more underrated products of the 1960s counterculture was the rise of media-literate satire, of which the most prominent representatives are Monty Python in the U.K. and Woody Allen in the U.S. As much as I enjoyed Cold Turkey, it still represented the “old” brand of stolid and blockheaded satire that disdained, or simply failed to notice, the juicy target of media tropes as a central, and not a secondary, subject of mirth. Woody Allen was one of the first humor writers to take that ball and run with it, and Bananas is a key early text in the evolution of the modern satirical sensibility.