Also, ninth in an occasional series, “Patchouli and B.O.” (a
recollection of the ’70s)
Also fits this series:
“We’ll always have
Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films
[Edit 12/2/14. Edits 12/17/14.]
.
Strangely, this film has a four-star rating in Leonard
Maltin’s compendium, which I think reflects the agog esteem it was apt to be
held in whenever (just after its release?) Maltin and/or his reviewers first
assessed it, when it was more edgy and original-seeming. Today, this film looks
(to me) pretty ramshackle and, while amusing, it seems even less worth viewing
a second (or third) time than Allen’s first directorial effort, Take the Money and Run (1969). I would
give Bananas no more than three stars.
It reflects a couple things of a technical nature, showing
Allen’s growth as a filmmaker: first, it seems to have been culled from an
enormous amount of shot footage, much of it done in Puerto Rico (the amount of pre-edited
film was 240 reels, or 40 hours, according to Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen [Knopf, 2007], p. 270). This can
suggest that there are a lot of little gems in the film, in that the more work
is done (in terms of exposing film), the higher the likelihood there is good
stuff to make up the final film.
It turns out, according to its editor Ralph Rosenblum, that while there was a lot to cut down—and Rosenblum
felt that this film was his biggest editing task within his years working for
Allen—the story basically was all skits, not an engrossing overarching story.
Thus the editing trick was to assemble the skits in a way that made them work
best. (Lax, p. 270.)
And this sums up the way the film seems: like a train of
amusing skits, nothing more.
Allen’s persona as
comic nebbish fully arrives; a tangled story allows antics
There’s also a sort of cheesy meanness to at least some of
the humor. This was, like Take the Money,
an Allen film that was like a story made up of standup bits; but while now the
story doesn’t involve a criminal but what Allen would more or less patent as
his version of an antihero/nebbish, this nebbish is still a rather
unsympathetic character at various turns. And if it wasn’t for the fact that some of the humor still appeals after
all these years, you could write this film off as a flimsy, faded product of
its times, reflective of an early-’70s rebelliousness and occasional lapses
into daring tastelessness, but (aside from being of “anthropological” value)
not quite having enough relevant (or still-resonant) humor to outweigh the more
dated aspects.
Which brings me to the second way it shows Allen growing as
a filmmaker: this is in his performance as Fielding Mellish, a New York–area
products tester who meets Nancy, a young activist (Louise Lasser) seeking
his signature on a political petition; in her he forms a romantic interest. A bit
later, after an intriguing, amusing, but slightly tedious (on second watching)
breakoff conversation, she dumps him. In an increasingly whimsical story, Mellish
rather desultorily goes to fictional San Marcos, a South American country for
whose enlightened rebels Nancy had been getting signatures on a petition; the
two of them were originally, in an access of political enthusiasm (in part),
going to go there together.
Once he is there, Mellish gets mixed up with the government,
run by a newly acceded dictator named Emilio Molina Vargas (Carlos Montalban, brother of actor Ricardo [I didn’t know that until doing this review],
and portrayer of “El Exigente,” the character in the Savarin TV commercials in
the 1960s and ’70s). There is also a rebel group, supposedly the good guys for
whom Nancy in New York (and her presumed political group) provided grassroots
(if token) American support. After being set up to take a fall for the
dictator, Mellish is capture by the rebels, headed by one Esposito (Jacobo Morales, by today an esteemed Puerto Rican filmmaker) …and eventually
Mellish gets made leader of San Marcos himself. And goes to the U.S. on the
country’s behalf…and is captured by the FBI as a suspected subversive, etc.
Allen as Mellish really pours on the comic nebbish act. You
can tell that Allen is now comfortable with being a distinctive kind of
character on film; in Take the Money,
he seemed to inhabit a role that he could do without the American audience
necessarily accepting him yet as a certain kind of film actor; his thinking may
have been, if they saw him as old standup Woody, good enough. Take the Money adequately met audience expectations
for him as an actor/director that were still developing, with the film’s etched
“portrait of the nebbish as a young yutz.”
Now in 1970-71, Allen seems to be aware he is a kind of
“film character brand,” or at least he’s working hard to establish this. His
performance in Bananas as a kind of
“Ubernebbish” seems to take the persona that we, today, have long associated
with him to a sort of extreme that, in retrospect, almost undercuts his
intentions (i.e., goes into self-parody at times). This goes along with his
now-frumpy longish hair (1970 style) and his adapting Bob Hope in that comic’s form of the wisecracking coward
in a peripatetic romp through an unlikely situation. And the result in Allen’s
hands in 1971 might be quite amusing to those who don’t quite know his work
yet, but may seem slightly embarrassing to those well versed in his larger body
of work with its mature efforts.
That is, people who grew up with Allen in the 1970s might
have felt this was his first great film as a kind of fertile comic. To me
today, knowing how he developed as a film writer and director, Bananas looks like a cheesy, flashy
entertainment almost as dated as a manic also-ran installment of TV’s Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.
Tidbits
* This film was cowritten by Allen and Mickey Rose, who also
helped him with Take the Money. Jack
Grossberg, associate producer on the earlier film, is full producer here.
Marvin Hamlisch again provides a complementing music score.
* This was Allen’s first film with the distribution by the
studio United Artists. UA would remain with him through 1980’s Stardust Memories.
* Sylvester Stallone appears as an extra in the
sequence on the subway train—he is one of two punks who start assaulting an old
woman with crutches. (Yes, that is one emblem of the 1970s—punks who committed
petty crime on the streets, at least as seen in mass media, were just as often
white as other races.)
* There is some ethnic or values-related humor in Bananas that some would regard as in not
the best of taste today. At one point, Mellish says that if he had stayed in
college—he says he was in the Black Studies program—he would be Black by now.
This might have seemed a bit edgy and a little off-color at the time; to me
today, it is not especially
offensive, but I can see how a range of people of color today could be put off
by it. (By the way, I am proud of my role in doing editorial work, as did many
other northern New Jersey freelancers [as well as publisher staffers], on African
American History: A Journey of Liberation, by Molefi Kete Asante, a
textbook published by Peoples Publishing Group in 2001.)
* Roman Catholics can take umbrage today at something in Bananas, too (in his early films, Allen
was big on what you might call “comparative-religion” humor that was allowable in the early 1970s,
given the rampant “freethinking” modes of cultural attitudes and criticism of
the time). Toward the film’s end, there is a mock TV commercial—the sort of
thing Saturday Night Live would get
big on—for fictional “New Testament” cigarettes. (Who remembers TV ads for
cigarettes? I do, but rather vaguely.) Dan Frazer, an actor maybe most
well known today for being on TV’s Kojak,
here plays the streetwise priest recommending the cigarettes to a parishioner. (Frazer
played a Freudian psychoanalyst in Take
the Money.)
This film’s basic style has been much imitated since,
probably to better effect—such as in Airplane!
(1980).
