Bananas

By the time he got to Bananas, Woody Allen was reaching new heights in absurdist comedy. The idea of covering a South American revolution as a sporting event certainly was original one. Even getting to the point of getting the voice of American sports Howard Cossell to join the fun.

Allen is refining his schlepp persona in Bananas. Although he divorced his leading lady Louise Lasser in real life the two worked well together here. Allen tries to get a relationship going, but Lasser is interested in social causes. She has a bleeding heart for the people of the South American country of San Marcos and gives Woody his walking papers.

So off Allen goes to San Marcos as the schlepp from Brooklyn mixes with all kinds of folks there from dictator Carlos Montalban right down to the Che Guevara revolutionaries.

So many absurd moments in Bananas to count. My favorite is ordering takeout for the revolutionary army from a South American version of a Jewish delicatessen.

Definitely a must for Woody Allen.

"Bananas" is just that on the surface - a crazy, off the wall movie written by, directed by, and starring a very young Woody Allen as a clumsy New Yorker who winds up as the leader of a small country.

In the beginning, Allen plays a product tester whose parents are surgeons (in fact, he walks in on them at one point while they're performing surgery, and they have him take over the reins). He basically just wants to get laid, and when a young activist (Louise Lasser) appears at his door with a petition, he sees an opportunity.

The two eventually break up, and in despair, he quits his job and goes to San Marcos, one of her causes. There he becomes a pawn in the revolution, later becoming their leader dressed like Castro but with a red beard.

Only Allen could have imagined this, and it's quite brilliant. Underneath the one-liners and crazy situations is a statement about the war in Vietnam and the way it was reduced to sports reporting on television. To make his point, Howard Cossell is on hand for a play by play of the character's wedding night before an audience.

Total Woody, with some hilarious moments. Highly recommended.

I went to see "Bananas," in the early 1970s with three of my high school buddies, in our local theater. And, it remains -- three decades later -- one of the most memorable and one of my most talked about movie-going experiences ever. So much of it was comprised of absolutely hysterical scenes which I've told countless people about through the years, and still tell people about.

Watching this movie today, it seems as if it had been somewhat haphazardly written. I get the feeling that Woody Allen had kept a journal in which he noted the funniest sights he'd witnessed and the cleverest one-liners he'd heard, over a period of years, and then set about mixing all of these totally unrelated funny things into one script. It's like he was saying to himself, "I think I'll throw in the bit about the guy trying to discreetly buy a sex magazine in a quiet neighborhood store and getting embarrassed, and then the snake bite bit later on. But first before the next plot turn, I think I'll put in the bit in which a guy gets out of his car and falls into an open manhole.", etc. You feel at times like you're watching a Benny Hill-type comedy show, or a TV variety show with a series of comedy skits that have nothing at all to do with each other. Somehow, Woody blended it all together into a fairly coherent story. There are also a few scenes which feature "Airplane"/"Naked Gun"-style tongue-in-cheek humor. But, this movie had been made *long* before those were even thought of. There's a message in that: This movie was ahead of its time. There's a segment of "Bananas," early on, which is just one outrageously funny bit after another after another.

I guess the movie doesn't really have a point . . . except maybe that maniacal dictators are crazy, dangerous and should be driven from power . .. or maybe that freedom is worth fighting for . . . or maybe that some causes are worth laying down your life for. Obviously, there's relevance in all of that for us, today. Or maybe the whole point of this movie could simply be that Woody Allen knows how to make people laugh.

Later, Art

Bananas is like a cookie-batter of all of those early Woody Allen jokes all plopped into a bowl and shaken around. It's a film loaded with political jokes, but without a direct focus aside from Cuba and dictators and the like. There are numerous sexual jokes, including one of Woody's funniest scenes involving a magazine (the buying and holding on a subway, very silent comedy-like). And even Howard Cosell becomes an iconic figure in Woody's comedy in the brilliant opening scenes. The plot is very loose, so if you're looking for that look elsewhere. Also, to put it mildly, some of the jokes may not work at all for some viewers of today. But it's the go-for-broke irreverence of the picture that has it still worth viewing today. Much of Woody's own verbal bits are very good, but it's also worth to note how the physical comedy- while crude and a little off-key- also has a good ring to it. Unlike the director's later films, you can still sense that he's trying to 'get' how to make a film, and so in trying to do anything he can think of to get a laugh, of course, some of it doesn't work. For example, in Cuba the gag where the gargantuan pile of dung is carried down the stairs with the Lain music in the background gives a grin, but not as big a laugh as might be intended. Indeed, this might be Woody's most 'immature' film, while still containing some of his more biting, satirical jabs at dictators and oddball politics. Woody would still have this wild, go-for-broke style of humor more akin to some of his quirkier short stories in other films of the early 70s. While this isn't as successful in that regard as Sleeper or Love and Death, I'd still watch it again if it was on TV; even the romantic subplot, undercooked in comparison with the rest of the more satirical stuff, is interesting.

Woody Allen's second film as co-writer/director/star (not including "What's Up, Tiger Lily?") is a grab-bag of lunatic revue sketches, some of them hilarious. Spurned by his activist girlfriend, product-testing schnook in New York City quits his job and heads to a strife-ridden Latin American country to become a part of their revolution. Trenchant political satire must have looked outrageous in 1971, but time has made a few of these gags gruesomely topical and accurate (but no less funny). Targets include man-woman sexual matters (territory Allen was spot-on with right from the start), television commentary (sent up brilliantly), urban violence, Catholicism, psychiatry, assassinations, a Marx Brothers-styled courtroom, Miss America and...J. Edgar Hoover. The pacing seldom flags, but Allen's screenplay (penned with his "Take the Money and Run" partner, Mickey Rose) sags in the middle--perhaps he should have kept the action going in NYC a little longer. Terrific music score from Marvin Hamlisch, adept comedic work from the entire crazy cast (including deadpan Howard Cosell and Roger Grimsby as themselves). **1/2 from ****