Bananas (Jack Rollins-Charles Joffe Production, United Artists, 1971)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The last movie I watched July 20 – this time with my husband Charles, who arrived home from work about halfway through Find the Blackmailer and joined me for the next film on Turner Classic Movies’ schedule – was Bananas, the delightful 1971 political farce starring Woody Allen (who also directed and co-wrote the film with Mickey Rose) as Fielding Mellish, a hapless products tester for a large corporation who gets embroiled in a South American revolution in the fictional country of “San Marcos” thanks to Nancy (Allen’s then-wife Louise Lasser), a political activist who gets involved in the U.S. support committee for rebel leader Esposito (Jacobo Morales) against dictator General Emilio A. Vargas (Carlos Montalbán), who in the opening scene stages a coup d’état against the duly and democratically elected “El Presidente.” The film’s famous opening – in which actual newscasters Roger Grimsby, Don Dunphy and Howard Cosell appear as themselves and narrate the coup as it’s taken place, including the assassination of the President, with Cosell pushing his way through the rioting crowd to get “El Presidente”’s dying words and then to interview Vargas – plays quite differently after January 6, 2021, in which a group of Americans tried to do the same thing (essentially try to stage a riot to prevent the peaceful transition of power and keep Donald Trump in the White House) and broadcast themselves in the act on social media. Charles recalled having seen Bananas many times, usually with his mother since it was a mainstay of the one premium-cable channel they got when he was growing up, and it was a little embarrassing that he knew the lines better than I did. He quoted them to me well in advance of the movie, including the announcement Esposito makes after his revolution succeeds that from then on the national language of San Marcos will be Swedish and people will be required to change their underwear every 30 minutes and wear them outside their pants so the state authorities can check.

Bananas is a sheer delight of a film and evidence that Woody Allen, at least when he was considerably younger and more lithe than he is now, could do physical comedy effectively. It was also clear that he was ripping off from the best; an early scene in which he’s testing an “Exerciser” so busy executives can work out while they’re in the office at their desks (including being inundated with basketballs they’re obliged to catch and throw back through a hoop while they’re working) was pretty obviously inspired by the feeding machine the bosses in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (to my mind Chaplin’s greatest film, in which he made explicit the political and social criticism that had been implicit since his early days) invent and test on him so they won’t have to give their workers lunch breaks. Bananas pretty much goes for lowbrow (or as lowbrow as Woody Allen ever got) humor rather than sophisticated political satire, but for what it is it’s a great and marvelously funny movie. I especially liked the sequence in which two thugs terrorize Mellish on a New York subway – and one of them is the very young Sylvester Stallone. (I had previously read somewhere that Stallone had had a small part in a Woody Allen movie pre-Rocky, but I had forgotten about it until I recognized him last night.) It’s also got a great trial sequence at the end – Mellish has been chosen president of San Marcos after Esposito’s mental meltdown, he’s been asked to the U.S. to see if he as an American can get foreign aid money for the country, but instead of being met with honors he’s arrested and tried for treason – of which the highlight is the appearance of African-American actress Dorthi Fox as J. Edgar Hoover. When they’re asked why they’re disguised as a Black woman, Fox as Hoover explains, “I have enemies everywhere!” For some reason Allen and Rose decided to end the film with the wedding night of Fielding and Nancy being covered in the same way as the coup d’état in the opening, with Howard Cosell and the other newscasters doing a play-by-play account of their sex on the wedding night (and naturally, this being a Woody Allen movie, she’s disappointed that it didn’t last longer and he insists that he gave it his all, in more ways than one), and though it’s not exactly the funniest thing Woody Allen has ever done it’s a nice companionate way for this film to end.