Bananas (1971)
Film Overview
With Bananas, Woody Allen takes the nervous New York outsider of his early films and drops him into a Latin American revolution, creating one of the fastest and most anarchic comedies of his career.
Allen plays Fielding Mellish, a product tester whose life changes when he meets Nancy, a politically committed activist played by Louise Lasser. When their relationship fails, Mellish travels to the fictional republic of San Marcos, partly in an attempt to prove that he is capable of becoming the kind of politically engaged person Nancy might admire.
Instead, he becomes caught between the dictatorship of General Emilio M. Vargas and a group of revolutionaries led by Esposito. Through a series of accidents, misunderstandings and increasingly ridiculous circumstances, Mellish goes from American tourist to guerrilla fighter and eventually to the leader of the country.
Allen again co-wrote the screenplay with Mickey Rose, continuing the collaboration that began with Take the Money and Run. The film expands the earlier picture’s rapid-fire comedy into a much larger world of political satire, television parody and physical comedy.
Howard Cosell appears as himself, treating political assassination, revolution and even Mellish’s wedding night with the breathless language of televised sport.
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My Review
Revolution according to Fielding Mellish
Bananas feels like Woody Allen discovering that the comic freedom of Take the Money and Run can be pushed even further. The earlier film was already fast, fragmented and happy to abandon realism whenever a joke demanded it. Here Allen takes that same instinct and applies it to politics, revolution, television, romance and almost anything else that crosses his path.
Fielding Mellish is another early version of the Woody Allen outsider, but I think he is funnier than Virgil Starkwell precisely because his ambitions are less clearly defined. Virgil at least knows what he wants to be, even if he is hopeless at becoming it. Mellish seems to have reached adulthood without developing a convincing idea of who he is at all.
His job as a product tester is a perfect introduction. Allen surrounds him with inventions that already look like jokes before anybody has said anything. The office exercise equipment, the heated toilet seat and the absurd machinery establish a world in which technological progress seems to have been designed specifically to humiliate the people using it.
Then Nancy arrives, and Mellish immediately tries to become whatever he thinks she might want. Louise Lasser plays her with a kind of impatient seriousness that works particularly well against Allen. Nancy believes in causes. Mellish believes, mainly, in Nancy.
That difference is the beginning of everything. He does not travel to San Marcos because he has suddenly developed a sophisticated political philosophy. He goes because his romantic life has collapsed and he is still trying to become a version of himself that might impress her.
Mellish doesn’t join a revolution because he believes in it. He joins because he has run out of better ideas about what to do with his life.
I like that Allen never pretends Mellish is secretly heroic. He is frightened, confused and consistently a few moments behind everybody around him. When he arrives in San Marcos he behaves like a tourist who has accidentally wandered onto the wrong film set.
The political world surrounding him is intentionally ridiculous. General Vargas is a dictator presented with the broad gestures of a comic-book tyrant, while the revolutionaries are hardly more organised. Nobody seems capable of governing anything for very long.
That is where the film’s satire becomes more interesting than its deliberately silly surface suggests. Allen is not really attempting a serious analysis of Latin American politics. His subject is the theatre of politics: slogans, uniforms, speeches, television coverage and the speed with which one absurd authority can replace another.
The revolution itself becomes another kind of performance. Mellish acquires a beard, military clothing and eventually political authority without becoming noticeably more competent. The image changes while the person underneath remains exactly the same.
I think that is one of the things Allen understood particularly well in these early films. Identity is often no more secure than the clothes, job or social role somebody happens to be wearing. Virgil Starkwell wants to look like a criminal. Mellish ends up looking like a revolutionary leader. Neither costume makes the man beneath it any more convincing.
The pace is relentless. There are moments when the film seems almost impatient with its own plot because another joke is waiting. A scene begins, establishes a premise, delivers the gag and immediately moves somewhere else.
That can make Bananas feel rougher than Allen’s later work, but I find the roughness enormously appealing. It has the energy of somebody who has suddenly realised that a feature film can contain almost anything.
Politics, romance and revolution all become performances, and Mellish somehow ends up playing the leading role without ever learning the script.
Howard Cosell is one of the smartest elements in the film. His appearances turn history into sports broadcasting. The assassination that opens the film is reported as though viewers are watching a major televised event, complete with the familiar rhythms of commentary and analysis.
It is funny because Cosell never breaks character. He brings exactly the same professional seriousness to absurd political violence that he would have brought to boxing or football. Allen does not need to tell us that television can turn anything into spectacle. He simply lets Cosell demonstrate it.
The idea returns brilliantly at the end. Mellish and Nancy’s wedding night becomes another televised sporting event, with Cosell providing commentary and analysis as though the private lives of two people have naturally become material for public entertainment.
Looking at it now, the joke feels oddly modern. The mechanisms have changed, but the appetite for turning private behaviour into public content certainly has not.
Allen himself seems much more confident physically than he did in Take the Money and Run. There is a wonderful willingness to make Mellish look ridiculous. He is dragged around, beaten, confused, disguised and repeatedly placed in situations where everybody else appears to understand the rules except him.
The subway sequence is one of the scenes I always remember. A young Sylvester Stallone appears as one of the thugs intimidating passengers, years before Rocky transformed him into one of the most recognisable figures in American cinema. Mellish wants to intervene but knows perfectly well that he is physically incapable of doing so.
It is a small scene, but it contains the entire character. Mellish has enough awareness to recognise what courage ought to look like and enough self-knowledge to suspect that he does not possess it.
The joke is never that Mellish becomes brave. It is that events keep promoting him faster than his personality can possibly keep up.
Louise Lasser is crucial because Nancy gives the chaos something to push against. She is politically earnest in a film that distrusts almost every form of earnestness. Mellish is attracted to her partly because she possesses exactly the certainty he lacks.
Their scenes together are often funniest when they are simply talking. The relationship allows Allen to move away from the revolutionary spectacle and return to the kind of anxious conversational comedy that would become increasingly important in the films ahead.
Even here, romance is partly a problem of incompatible self-images. Nancy wants commitment, seriousness and purpose. Mellish keeps trying to provide evidence that he possesses those qualities, usually in the least convincing way imaginable.
Carlos Montalbán plays Vargas broadly but effectively. The dictator is less a psychologically developed villain than another absurd symbol of authority. Jacobo Morales gives Esposito a similar comic directness. Both men belong to a political world in which power can change hands suddenly but the absurdity remains constant.
There are jokes in Bananas that are very much products of 1971, and not every one lands in quite the same way now. That is almost inevitable with a film built so aggressively around topical comedy. But what surprises me whenever I return to it is how much of the broader satire still works.
Television still transforms serious events into spectacle. Political language still becomes performance. People still adopt identities because they want to belong somewhere. And public figures can still rise into positions for which they seem almost comically unprepared.
Marvin Hamlisch’s music contributes enormously to the tone. The opening with Quiero La Noche immediately gives the film a musical personality quite different from the urban nervousness of Take the Money and Run. There is warmth, rhythm and a deliberately exaggerated sense of place.
Allen also uses music as another comic tool. Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and excerpts from Victor Herbert’s Naughty Marietta arrive in contexts where their grandeur only makes the surrounding nonsense more ridiculous.
The location work helps enormously too. Puerto Rico provides the fictional San Marcos with enough visual reality that the political absurdity has something solid to play against. The contrast with New York is particularly effective because Mellish looks faintly misplaced in both worlds.
In New York he is an unsuccessful product tester with no real direction. In San Marcos he is an unsuccessful tourist who somehow becomes a revolutionary. His surroundings change dramatically, but his essential confusion travels with him.
That may be the thing I like most about Bananas. For all the revolution, dictators, guerrillas and television crews, the film is ultimately about a man who cannot quite work out who he is supposed to be.
Allen would explore that uncertainty in much richer emotional terms later. Alvy Singer, Isaac Davis and many of the characters who follow will spend enormous amounts of time analysing themselves. Mellish is too early for that. He simply keeps moving.
And the film moves with him. There is very little reflection, very little sentiment and almost no desire to slow down. One joke leads to another until the whole thing feels like a comedy accelerating under its own momentum.
I would never argue that Bananas is as complete a film as Allen’s best work of the later 1970s and 1980s. It does not have the emotional range of those films and does not particularly want it.
But as an example of the fearless, anarchic early period, it remains one of the most enjoyable. There is something liberating about watching Allen make a film that seems prepared to follow a joke almost anywhere.
Take the Money and Run established the comic voice. Bananas gives that voice a much bigger playground.
Cast and Characters
Woody Allen
A directionless New York product tester whose attempt to impress Nancy eventually carries him into the revolution in San Marcos.
Louise Lasser
A politically committed activist whose relationship with Mellish provides the original reason for his unlikely interest in San Marcos.
Carlos Montalbán
The dictator of San Marcos whose rule sets the film’s revolution in motion.
Nati Abascal
One of the principal figures Mellish encounters after becoming entangled in events in San Marcos.
Jacobo Morales
A leader of the revolutionary movement into which Mellish is gradually and somewhat accidentally absorbed.
Howard Cosell
The celebrated broadcaster treats political violence and Mellish’s private life with the language and intensity of televised sport.
Marvin Hamlisch gives the revolution its own comic rhythm
Marvin Hamlisch returned after Take the Money and Run, creating a score capable of moving between New York comedy, revolutionary parody and romance. The soundtrack is one of the elements that allows Bananas to change tone so quickly without losing momentum.
Quiero La Noche
Heard over the opening titles, Quiero La Noche immediately establishes the film’s musical identity. Its lively Latin character provides the perfect introduction to San Marcos and to a comedy that is about to treat revolution with very little respect.
A score that follows the film wherever the joke leads
Hamlisch’s original score ranges from Latin-inflected music to romantic passages and broad comic accompaniment, mirroring a film that moves constantly between New York and the fictional San Marcos.
The closing credits use ’Cause I Believe in Loving, with music by Hamlisch, lyrics by Howard Liebling and vocals by Jake Holmes.
Allen also makes comic use of existing music, including Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and Victor Herbert’s Naughty Marietta.
’Cause I Believe in Loving
Music by Marvin Hamlisch, lyrics by Howard Liebling and performed by Jake Holmes.
1812 Overture
Classical grandeur is used in a context that makes the scale of the music part of the joke.
Naughty Marietta
Excerpts from Herbert’s operetta appear during one of the film’s more absurd sequences.
Marvin Hamlisch
Hamlisch’s second consecutive score for Allen helps define the exuberant musical personality of the filmmaker’s earliest comedies.
Locations
Bananas moves between Fielding Mellish’s New York and the fictional republic of San Marcos, filmed largely on location in Puerto Rico.
The contrast is essential. New York establishes Mellish as an ordinary urban outsider; Puerto Rico gives the revolutionary sections a real landscape against which the film’s political absurdity can play.
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico provided the principal locations for the fictional Latin American republic and much of the revolutionary action.
Playa de Cerro Gordo
The coastal area at Cerro Gordo was used for scenes around the revolutionaries’ camp.
Manhattan
Mellish’s ordinary life and his relationship with Nancy are rooted in New York before the story carries him into the revolution.
Wall Street
The Wall Street area appears in one of the film’s New York sequences.
Queens Community College
The production also used Queens Community College among its New York locations.
New York & Puerto Rico
The two principal filming regions give the movie its deliberate split between Mellish’s familiar urban world and the revolutionary fantasy of San Marcos.
Awards and Recognition
Best Comedy Screenplay Nomination
Woody Allen and Mickey Rose were nominated for Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen.
Golden Charybdis Nomination
Woody Allen received a Golden Charybdis nomination at the 1971 festival.
No. 69 — 100 Years…100 Laughs
The American Film Institute ranked Bananas at No. 69 on its list of the 100 funniest American films.
A Landmark Early Allen Comedy
Its mix of political parody, physical comedy and rapid-fire absurdity helped establish the style Allen would push even further in Sleeper and Love and Death.