Bananas

Slip

Even at a scant eighty-two minutes, Bananas feels too long. While many of the comic moments at the beginning are excellent, there's a certain point past which almost nothing seems funny. The movie loses focus in the transition from Manhattan to San Marcos. Woody Allen is most comfortable in The City, where the material is obviously familiar to him. The best moments not necessarily in Manhattan are Allen's parodies of the American sports media's ego and methods. I'm shocked that this material hasn't gone stale in almost three decades. I'm more shocked that Howard Cosell participated voluntarily. I have to wonder what Cosell did to upset Allen that caused his particularly unflattering appearance in Sleeper two years later.

Fielding's Hillish

When Bananas was made, "The Benny Hill Show" was only in the second year of a twenty-year run, but Allen had already co-opted the use of background music as the foreground sound. Watching Allen in a news store trying to be discrete while Marv Hamlisch music heightens the slapstick is humor that I hope will never go out of style.