Bananas (1971)

Starring: Woody Allen, with small roles from Howard Cosell, Don Dunphy, Roger Grimsby, and Sylvester Stallone
Grade: Classic

In only his third feature, Woody Allen gives us one of the best films of 1971 and one of the greatest comedies of all time.

Summary

Reporter Don Dunphy for ABC’s Wide World of Sports opens the film in the South American country of San Marcos reporting a live assassination he and a group of onlookers are about to watch. The citizens plan on killing the president of San Marcos and replace those in power with a military dictatorship. The reporter updates the television audience at home of events leading up to it like riots, the bombing of the American Embassy, and leader of the labor union Julio Doaz being dragged from his house and beaten by an angry mob. Howard Cosell is also on the scene. El Presidente walks out of his office and is shot on the front steps in front of everyone. After getting El Presidente’s last words on camera with a quick interview (“fascist dictator”), Cosell tries to get an interview with the new man leading San Marcos, General Emilio Molina Vargas (Carlos Montalban). They discuss how Vargas is hated, with Cosell pointing out that there may be democratic guerilla factions in the hills opposing him. Vargas lets it be known he will have his soldiers find him. Cosell then sends the show back to New York as we jump into the credits.

Next, we are taught of the invention of “The Execusizer”, a workout machine for people who work desk jobs. The men trying to sell the product to an executive have their research tester Fielding Mellish (Allen) demonstrate how to use the machine. Naturally, the machine goes haywire during the meeting and Mellish comes off looking like an idiot. Following work, Mellish wonders why he had to quit college because he felt like he had a bigger future in store. His co-workers are tired of hearing his complaining. They discuss plans after work, with Mellish suggesting a double date. He doesn’t have one, but they tell him to ask another co-worker named Norma who turns him down because she’s having friends over to watch some pornographic movies. Later, Mellish tries to discreetly buy a porno magazine in a shop full of women, but the worker asks another co-worker aloud how much it is, and it makes him look like a weirdo. Following this, Mellish rides in the subway and some thugs walk in. One of them is played by a young Sylvester Stallone. After they mess with all of these people and try to purse snatch some old woman, Mellish, originally trying to ignore them, catches them off guard and throw both outside the doors of the subway at a stop. However, the doors re-open, and they chase Mellish.

Sometime after, Mellish is making dinner at his apartment. He is interrupted by a visitor named Nancy (Louise Lasser). She’s going door-to-door asking for people to sign a petition for the United States government to break relations with San Marcos because of how they’re now being run by a brutal military dictatorship. Somehow, Mellish manages to break the point on the pencil when trying to sign it, so he lets her in. While grabbing another pencil for her, she talks about how San Marcos is on the verge of a revolution and how she wants the U.S. to support the rebels. They discuss her basic interests, job stuff, and how she’s a college student majoring in philosophy. Early on, Mellish becomes greatly interested in her. He tries to get her to go out, but she’s very busy. Even so, she gives him her phone number to potentially meet up on Saturday. He’s elated. Later, we see him driving and talking to himself about Nancy and going through fake conversations about how things will go. Once he parks and exits his car, he falls into a manhole. Next, we go through a montage of their blossoming relationship. At one point, Mellish even turns down a poker night with his co-workers in favor of protesting at the embassy. Later, they finally have sex. Following this, we see Mellish in therapy. He talks about his relationship with his parents, being beaten, and being a bed-wetter when he was a kid. He also talks about this recurring dream he has of being crucified on the streets of New York. He’s taken by a group of druids to be parked on the street, but another crucified man is being placed there at the same time, prompting both groups of druids to fight.

Shortly after, Nancy breaks up with Mellish on account of “something missing” in the relationship. He doesn’t take it well, begging for some kind of specific reason as to how he screwed things up. She gives him a million reasons why but insists none of them are the main reason. It’s just that something was missing, though she does say she needs a leader and Mellish isn’t that. He quits his job, with a plan to go to San Marcos since he planned on going there with Nancy because she wanted to write a paper on it. He tells his parents of his plan while they’re performing a surgery, as both are surgeons. Mellish’s father Al tries to bring up how he should go back to college to become a doctor, but Mellish is just trying to explain how he’s going to San Marcos. The patient even gets involved in the conversation and takes Mellish’s side. Al tries to show how smart Mellish is and involves him in the surgery, coaching him through it while his mother says it isn’t a good idea. Eventually, Mellish gets the hell out of there and heads down to South America. In San Marcos, the citizens present General Vargas with horse manure equal to his weight, though he’s annoyed because he thought it was going to be diamonds. It’s explained by one of his advisors that they are an agrarian country and food is more valuable than gold. Mellish arrives in the poor country, going straight to his hotel room. There, we can see a picture of Vargas next to Jesus.

Back at Vargas’s palace, Vargas is told how they captured a rebel soldier this morning. Vargas asks if they’ve gotten information on when the rebels plan to strike, but they don’t know anything yet. They walk into the interrogation room and see that the rebel is being tortured by being played the entire score of the opera, Naughty Marietta. This is too much for the rebel soldier, so he starts talking. He tells them that the revolution is planned for the first week of July, which is only two months away. Vargas accuses him of being a liar because the timing of it, but he tells Vargas that rebel leader Esposito (Jacobo Morales) is planning for it to coincide with America’s Independence Day to imitate his hero George Washington. He doesn’t know where Esposito gets his weapons from though.

Surprisingly enough, Mellish gets a direct invite from Vargas for dinner at the palace. Mellish arrives and Vargas introduces him to Col. Diaz (René Enríquez) and Lt. Arroyo (Jack Axelrod). At dinner, Vargas has a guy try his food for poison, and it kills him in front of them. Vargas eats it anyway because he says he’s developed an immunity for poison since it’s happened so many times to him. Following dinner, they hang out and have a drink, with Vargas telling Mellish he’s trying to protect his people from communism. When Mellish tells him Esposito and his rebels aren’t communists, he snaps at Mellish and says they are. Shortly after a toast, Mellish leaves for the night. Once he exits, Vargas tells Diaz and Arroyo how perfect Mellish is for his plan. They will dress up as rebels and kill Mellish. This way the United States will see how bloodthirsty Esposito and his group are and give their support to Vargas. They plan on killing him as early as tomorrow afternoon. The next day, the disguised soldiers open fire on Mellish after a drive. Mellish is able to elude them but is knocked out. He wakes up in Esposito’s camp. The rebels knew the plan Vargas set up and let Mellish know what they tried to pull. Then, they take him to meet Esposito. Esposito tells Mellish that to the news media, Mellish is officially dead. Mellish wants to go back to New York, but it won’t be able to happen until Esposito and the rebels pull off their revolution. Unfortunately, this won’t happen for another six months.

Until then, he has to camp with the rebels and subsequently learn their ways to avoid being killed by the government, along with being an asset to the revolution. Once things start to progress in the right direction, Mellish quickly finds out that Esposito may not have been the right man for the job. Because of this, Mellish may reluctantly become the face of the revolution in San Marcos.

My Thoughts:

Early Woody Allen produced some of the most creative comedic endeavors put to film. As Allen put together his early films and mixed things with his classic, sex-crazed, smart-mouthed, awkward persona as the star, he was able to put himself in the craziest of premises and churn out entertaining feature after entertaining feature. He couldn’t be stopped and though I do love the intellectually written screenplays Woody Allen started to get into once he developed as a screenwriter and director in his later years, his older films will always hold a special place in my heart. They were so much fun and showed how if you put your mind to it, you can pretty much do anything in a film and make sense of it, if you’re a good enough filmmaker. This has been a trait of Allen’s from the beginning, and it’s why he’s one of my favorite filmmakers of all time.

For the record, Spike Lee has this vision as well, but I digress.

A film like Bananas is a perfect example of breaking the rules of what a traditional comedic film has to be. Channeling his beloved Marx Brothers, Allen’s film (along with the many he did in this era) is wacky, messy, gag-filled, and at times aimless. When I say aimless, I don’t mean it in a negative sense either. I mean that old style of comedic buffoonery in films that had a loosely-structured plot, allowing for anything comedically to happen along the way.

At one point, we get a commercial for “New Testament” cigarettes right before the ending. Why? Because it’s funny that’s why!

This type of plot structure is something that was present in every Marx Brothers film, and Allen uses this for the blueprint of Bananas. First of all, the basic premise is funny in itself. Following Fielding Mellish as he somehow finds himself at the center of a revolution of a South American country is hilarious. The cutaway gags happening in-between are very funny. Some may find it counterproductive to the story, but I see it as a way to show us how inept Mellish is. It sets us up perfectly for what is to become because we know how unprepared he is in life. It’s as if Allen is asking, “Can you imagine if this jackass ran an entire country?”. Gags like Mellish helping someone back up their car and they crash it, him somehow falling into a manhole after he exits his car, and him showing his personal problems in therapy all combine to give us this unlikely protagonist that is easily one of my favorite characters Allen has ever constructed. Hell, even when he’s tasked in helping with drugging and kidnapping a British ambassador when he’s a rebel, he accidentally does so to his cohorts during the scuffle, starting a chase scene that leads to him leading a congregation with a tire iron shaped like a cross. The stuff Allen thinks of to create a laugh in any sequence is not only funny but impressive. When he was assisting with the executions by having them pull numbers like he’s at a deli in New York, you can’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of Bananas. Anything can and will happen.

This is the world Allen creates for us, and we can’t help but appreciate how insane, as well as genius it is. It’s too unique to not be appealing to even the most snobbish of people.

It’s just a constant showing of Mellish finding himself in deeper shit and having to go with it because he’s never in a situation he can get out of. Thankfully, no matter what happens, he has a funny ass line to accompany it. When he asks when the revolution will begin so he can go back to New York, Esposito tells him it will be six months. He immediately exclaims, “Six months? I have a rented car!”.

This is legitimately one of my favorite films ever.

The unexpected twist of Esposito being mad with power was very amusing as well. After he changes the official language of San Marcos to Swedish, makes everyone change their underwear every half hour and wear them on the outside of their pants, and making every child under 16 years old, officially 16 years old, we cut to Mellish in horror. The look on Allen’s face is priceless as he asks, “What’s the Spanish word for straitjacket?”. Along with the gags, there are so many jokes and quotable lines from the film, you’ll see why Allen was such an influence and force in comedy in the 1970s. When people ask why Allen was so revered as a filmmaker and talent, I point to films like this. When they ask how good of a writer he was, I point to sequences like the iconic courtroom scene, or when the CIA sends troops to San Marcos and the soldiers don’t even know which side they are fighting for. One guy chimes in and says the agency isn’t taking any chances. As a result, some soldiers will be for them, and some will be against. That’s just plain funny! The goofy atmosphere Allen cultivates in movies like Bananas can’t be replicated by many comedic voices on this planet. When he brandishes the fake beard as his disguise when he becomes the president (as well as that scene where the interpreter is chased by workers at a mental institution), there’s no doubts about it. This film is a “Classic”.

I don’t know if it’s just because I love the film so much, but I loved Marvin Hamlisch’s “Quiero la Noche” played throughout the film. I couldn’t think of a more whimsical song fitting the vibe of such an eccentric film.

Now, if the story was focused a bit more, you could’ve easily gotten a full two-hour length out of the film. If we’re being honest, Allen could’ve gotten even more gold out of the political mess he found himself in. This is one of the only two things I think are knocks on the film. There was room for much more plot had he wanted to explore things more once he became in charge of San Marcos. Think about the Dr. Strangelove-like potential here! Can you imagine Mellish in a U.N. meeting and inadvertently causing a nuclear war with a major country or starting a war between two other countries and taking a backseat once he realized he fucked up? This could’ve made the film even bigger than it already was! The possibilities are already endless with how this film is structured and going this big with it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility. Plus, it would’ve been a much better ending than the one we got. This leads me to my only other criticism of the film. The romance doesn’t fit. I know early Woody Allen always had to include something sexual because he’s a creepy little fuck, but Bananas could’ve done without it. Though Mellish’s relationship with Nancy ignites the plot, the back-and-forth between them slowed things down a little too much. Don’t get me wrong, some of their conversations were still funny, but it took us away from the hysterical bits of Mellish wandering around on his own. It made even less sense to go back to the romance for the ending, despite how funny of a gag it is.

I miss films made like this. Bananas is one of my favorite films of all time. It’s arguably Woody Allen at his comedic best. It’s zany, chaotic, borderline surreal, unbelievably funny, and it never takes itself too seriously in its quest to entertain. There are so many imaginative ideas and gags filling this breezy runtime that you never get bored. You just enjoy Fielding Mellish waltzing through life, fucking things up left and right to the point of no return. From being a loser to a leader of a revolution in record time, Bananas is an all-time classic that will always be one of my personal favorites.