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Bananas (1971)

Posted By: Efgrapha

Date: 15 Aug 2014 17:31:25

One of Woody Allen's earlier, more slapstick-oriented efforts, Bananas tells the story of Fielding Mellish (Allen), a neurotic New Yorker who follows the object of his affections, Nancy (Louise Lasser), to the fictional Central American country of San Marcos, where she is involved in a revolution. Nancy wants nothing to do with Fielding, but he soon becomes a guest of the country's dictator (Carlos Montalban), before accidentally becoming the leader of San Marcos himself. Fielding is eventually shipped back to the US and tried as a subversive, but being that this is a comedy, and an especially light one at that, everything works out in the end. A far cry from Allen's later, more somber films, Bananas still works as an often hilarious amalgam of sight gags, one-liners, and bizarre asides.

Synopsis by Don Kaye, Allmovie.com

If you twist its arm (and anybody can—the movie is small), Woody Allen's new film, "Bananas," proclaims that all of life is raw material for a television game show. It opens with Howard Cosell and the staff of A.B.C.'s Wide World of Sports enthusiastically covering the Assassination of the Week, that of the President of the Latin-American republic of San Marcos, whose expiration, on cue, highlights the week of festivities begun with the sacking of the United States Embassy.

Some hallucinations later, the movie ends with Mr. Cosell hosting the on-camera consummation of a marriage, in the gold and white bridal suite of the Royal Manhattan Hotel, complete with instant replays and quarrelsome, post-encounter statements by the two principals.

Woody Allen is incurably, hopelessly sane, and "Bananas," which began yesterday at the Coronet Theater, is, without doubt the best Woody Allen comedy I've seen since his last film, "Take the Money and Run." It's also an indecently funny movie, on its own, and in spots—a qualification I add with some hesitation because I'm not sure that its unfunny spots are terribly important.

Thirty years ago, some very perceptive critics, including James Agee and Otis Ferguson, used to grow all sad and misty in print because W. C. Fields seldom made a movie that was as funny in its entirety as it was in its individual parts. Today, it doesn't make any difference. That was the sort of movie Fields made, and now we accept the rhythm of his comic genius, since it was an indispensable part of that genius.

The same may well be true of Woody Allen who, when he is good, is inspired. However, when he's bad, he's not rotten; rather, he's just not so hot.

"Bananas," which was directed and written by Allen (with Mickey Rose), had to do with Fielding Mellish (Allen) a frail, sly New York products tester, who accidentally becomes the dictator of San Marcos, and with Nancy (Louise Lasser), the sort of new school girl who breaks engagements to participate in dock strikes and yearns for relevance in her relationships.

Although it is cast in the comparatively classic, dumb-slob-who-succeeds narrative form, nothing in the story is so important that it can't be interrupted or forgotten for a visual or verbal gag, a variation on an old joke, some satire that takes reality to its outer reaches, or just a nice, crazy reference to a film classic ("Potemkin") that has almost been loved to death.

Allen's view of the world is fraught with everything except pathos, and it's a view I happen to find very funny. Here is no little man surviving with a wan smile and a shrug, but a runty, wise-mouthed guy whose initial impulses toward cowardice seem really heroic in the crazy order of the way things are. "New York Rifle Council Declares Death a Good Thing," reports a headline. The comic world of Allen's Fielding Mellish, however, is more fanciful than bleak or black. When Fielding, in a reverie, hears harp music, there is a logical explanation: there's a man playing a harp in Fielding's closet.

Allen is his own best actor, diffident and defensive, but I also like Miss Lasser (the former Mrs. Allen), who reminds me of a young Elaine May, and Carlos Montalban, as a Castro-like freedom fighter who, at his victory celebration, goes a little nuts and declares Swedish to be the official language.

Any movie that attempts to mix together love, Cuban revolution, the C.I.A., Jewish mothers, J. Edgar Hoover and a few other odds and ends (including a sequence in which someone orders 1,000 grilled cheese sandwiches) is bound to be a little weird—and most welcome.

Review by Vincent Canby, New York Times

IMDB 7,1/10 from 22 967 users
Wiki

Director: Woody Allen

Writers: Woody Allen, Mickey Rose

Cast: Woody Allen, Louise Lasser, Carlos Montalban and other