He scored a career in show business as a teenager by submitting one-liners to newspaper columnists who inhabited the world he dreamed of, and gradually met and worked with some of the storied names in that business, like Abe Burrows and Danny Simon. He wrote for television comedians and had a turn or two of his own in standup comedy, bringing down the house with the paradox of his own image--a homely little klutz with a brilliant mind and the clear yearning to appear debonair while tripping over the furniture. He could articulate this like no one else of his generation and it wasn't long, in show business years, before he was starring in movies he wrote for this character, this Hugh Hefner wannabe who unfortunately looked more like Arnold Stang. Bananas was one of the first movies he made, and even then, he thought of it as meaningless slapstick. He says in his memoir Apropos of Nothing that he was astonished it was taken as a political satire in Europe--writing that his intention was nothing more than to make people laugh. There are shades of the Marx Brothers, all three personified in Allen himself, and the movie, seen today, even foreshadows some of the serious work he was to produce later. There are leering male-chauvinist jokes (and no doubt Allen is a typical male chauvinist of his day--remember I said Hugh Hefner rather than Cary Grant), visual gags--I can't even explain to today's audiences why his J. Edgar Hoover in Bananas was one of the funniest images ever in the movies--a love story with the actress who was his muse for years (Louise Lasser, who projects an earnestness shining through her waif-like dependency), spoofs of television's obsession with sports, jokes about breasts, jokes about child molesters, and an irreverent attitude about everything. Allen was adroit in his movements, graceful even. He runs, jumps, falls into manholes--and in the trial scene toward the end, cross-examining himself as the witness and prosecutor, leaps back and forth, switching character while doing a brief dual role .
Watching Bananas, I can see why Woody Allen makes some women uneasy. Men of his generation were pretty frank about what they found attractive in the opposite sex, and Woody joked about it openly and sometimes in a vulgar way. A man who looks like that and seems to have a healthy sex drive (and doesn't mind verbalizing it) is automatically suspect, especially today. In Bananas there is a split-second on screen in which he, as the director of the film, spoofs that very concept. The character Allen is playing has managed to find and seduce a girl, and he's way more in love with her than she is with him. She's kicking him to the curb and he's angry about it. In the locker room with his male buddies, who are fairly good-looking guys, Allen fumes to a cohort, "Can you imagine a guy like me being dropped by a woman?" The set-up has both men looking at the camera, and Allen not seeing the look on the handsome face of the man behind him. It's the perfect example of a person looking askance. That Allen wrote the scene and directed it as he did speaks volumes. I'm sure he didn't have to tell the actor how to look at him. I laughed out loud--and, as I said, it was just a few seconds of screen time.
This movie came out at the beginning of his transition from standup comedy to a film career. He dismisses Bananas today as pointless comedy, but it was much cleverer than anything of its kind at the time, and it launched him as a movie actor, a writer, and a director. Looking at it now one cannot help but think of what a brilliant career he has had and regret that, although he is still producing films, they are not distributed in the United States. Now in his eighties, Woody is a pariah in Hollywood, because of what is to me a step too far in the "MeToo" movement. The story of his downfall is juicy, and he does not come off particularly well, but he deals with it all in detail in Apropos of Nothing. He made some mistakes, and no doubt some of them caused some pain--but his child molestation rap was fraudulent, and he has been happily married for some 20 years. The body of his work is equal to anything Hollywood has ever come up with. He continues to work on movies that get a good reception in Europe.
If you don't know Woody Allen's movies, or if like me you saw Bananas in 1971 but have little memory of it, it's a good way to discover the Woody Allen who used to keep us laughing. The list is long, and worth exploring.
