BANANAS

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Woody Allen

Trailer

M

  Perhaps more than any other genre with the exception of racist 1950s Disney cartoons,  comedy dates. It’s not all-encompassing. Slapstick lives forever – laughing at other people’s misery or lack of resistance to errant banana skins is a joy that’ll continue right up until the last of us crawls out of the pod and switches on the view screen implanted between our eyes. Likewise, the objects of a good satire – amazingly, nearly fifty years on, a lot of our dumb-bone planet is still dwelling under the greasy thumbs of several dictators and madmen in military clobber, so Woody joshing against the rule of a group of numb nuts with guns is still relevant and chucklesome, if a little sad for the lack of a utopia. What really groins the film is the timing, the rhythm and cadence of its patter. More than any other film here Bananas shows its age; it’s there in the length of scenes and postponement of punchlines, the music that flairs up across yet another interminable montage reminiscent of the one they dump into EVERY SINGLE SIMPSONS EPISODE FROM 2002 ONWARDS. If it ain’t funny now, it weren’t funny then. The piece is notable for kicking off many of Allen’s later themes and characters, from the neurotic Jew desperate to find a place for himself, to the neurotic Jew railing against the system with some clever quips, to the neurotic Jew struggling to force his way into an artistic girl’s underwear. It’s proto-Allen, shaky and dated, worth watching for only a few elements: Louise Lasser, the least remembered and most underrated of all his actresses, this bit, and the court room scene, an extended early masterclass in fucking about. From the jury getting high to the depiction of J. Edgar Hoover as a middle-aged black woman, it’s a joy from beginning to end, and highly worthy of a quick watch when you’ve a free four minutes.