Just watched on YouTube this rarity from one John G. Avildsen before his fame from Joe, Save the Tiger, Rocky, and the Karate Kid movies. This is a comedy about the Generation Gap and the ridiculous reactions among the middle agers of sex education for young kids being some kind of Communist plot. Rita and Lance Battle (Jane McLeod and Zachary Hains) are the parents of a teenage boy, Robbie (Devin Goldenberg), who happens to have a crush on his babysitter, Lydia (Diane Moore). Their neighbors are police Lt. Roger and Eve Manley (Dick Carballo and Rosella Olsen). Both Roger and Lance are against a psychiatrist, a Dr. Lily Whitehorn (Yvonne McCall), teaching sex education at her school for underage kids. It should be noted that both men have hangups as Lance can't bed his wife and Roger seems to be bi as evidenced by his relationship with female dresser Billie (Stanton Edgehill). I'll stop there and just say that the whole thing has a jump cut structure meant to emphasize some jokes that mostly don't work but is fascinating to watch. The discussions of Dr. Whitehorn with various students about sex and certain words are perhaps the most compellingly naturalistic dialogue of the entire thing that one gets the feeling that that was improvised while the other scripted parts seem obviously contrived. And then there are some stupid characterizations like that of a stuttering mailman (Jan Saint) who likes looking at "dirty" pictures or the aforementioned husbands. I did, however, like the nude bodies of the blondes, Ms. Olsen and Moore with the redhead Ms. McLeod not looking so bad, either. In summation, Guess What We Learned in School Today? gets some points in conception but almost nothing in execution. P.S. The little girl voicing the opening credits is the director's daughter, Katherine, and if I didn't read the cast list on IMDb, I wouldn't have recognized the first radio voice as that of Bret Morrison who I knew played Lamont Cranston/The Shadow on the old radio program, "The Shadow". Oh, and he's also a native of the same city I was born in, Chicago, Ill.
