It doesn’t, at least in my opinion. I used to find this movie hilarious when I was young. I guess my sense of humor is different now. Viewing it now I see all the things I didn’t years ago: tired jokes, setups for lame gags that you could see coming a mile away, routines where Allen goes into stand-up mode as if he’s in a club. Let me give you some examples (and I swear that I remembered hardly anything of the film as I hadn’t seen it since it came out.)
Allen in a car saying how cool he is now, totally in control. He stops the car and opens the door. I said to myself, don’t tell me he’s going to use the old chestnut of falling into a hole. He did and I groaned.
Allen at work telling his friend he’s going to protest at an embassy tonight. Don’t worry, he knows what he’s doing. And I knew just what was coming. He’ll be seen straight after completely overwhelmed by the protesters and helpless. Yep, one more strike against Allen.
He brings his date home. Right, I thought, this will be where everything goes wrong that possibly could. And sure enough that’s exactly what happens. I didn’t remember much about the film but even if I’d never seen it I could have predicted how most of the scenes would play out.
We have Allen the clumsy employee, Allen the disaster-prone Romeo, Allen the unlikely hero, succeeding through his ineptitude, all played out with dreary predictability, all accompanied by jokes some amusing, most not or only mildly.
I counted the times I actually laughed. Once when the person sitting next to him on the metro is being beaten up by two young thugs (one of them Sylvester Stallone) and Allen surreptitiously edges the person’s crutches away with his foot. That was funny, as was an exchange with Mia Farrow in the park. Some of the South American stuff raised a smile in me and once or twice a laugh. But that’s it, just a few laughs in around 90 minutes of film.
I don’t know how his other films stand up but this one has no legs at all.
Is it really fair to criticize a 1971 film for “lame gags that you could see coming a mile away?” That’s kind of like criticizing a 1971 Johnny Carson monologue for having jokes you’ve heard before.
I mean, sure, Woody Allen was playing a stereotype. OTOH, it really was a pretty distinctive character (a nerdy, intellectual, slapstick clutz), and Bananas was something like the fifth movie he had done, so by that time the character was polished up about as good as it could be. And the opening bit of covering a coup d’etat on Wide World of Sports is classic.
When it came out (I was 17), I went with a friend to see it and we laughed ourselves silly. I guess my tastes have changed, because now in my dotage, I don’t find Woody Allen to be particularly entertaining at all.
WhatExit?, I agree Sleeper doesn’t hold up well. Bananas, however, I think still works. Central America hasn’t changed that much, really (fewer coups nowadays, but still); nerdy pathetic guys will always be trying to impress girls by styling themselves as revolutionaries; and rebel armies will still order sandwiches by the thousand from the corner deli (one with mustard).
My dissertation advisor in Latin American human geography and I still share a chuckle over the crazy language interpreter on the tarmac (“welcome to…JU-nited stay…”).
And the “Is it because I’m…lousy in bed?” “No.” “Oh, so I’m good in bed?” “No…but that’s not it” will never grow old.
There are still some LOL moments in his older films. I wouldn’t expect anything else.
I think I’ll wear my underwear on the outside this Thursday.
“Rebels are we!”
I saw Bananas and Sleeper when they first came out. I thought it was quite lightweight and unremarkable comedy, nothing to write home about. Allen matured considerably over the next 40 years, and if he hadn’t, those would have faded into obscurity.
To me, *Sleepers *still had some laughs, but nothing to match the snot-shooting-out-my-nose funny of when i saw it at the pcitures.
The one that I’ve continued to enjoy has been Take the Money and Run. The mockumentary format has come into its own, but it still stands up well as an amalgam of broad farce, puns and silliness.
It is entirely possible humor from 1971 hasn’t aged well. One thing very noticeable about older comedies is how slowly they are passed. Modern comedies are joke machines (sometimes to a fault) but comedies form the 70s and 80s can sometimes seem more like comedy drams because the jokes are spread so thin.
Also classic movies can sometimes be hit by the Casablanca effect where a movie seems cornball because it contains the cliches it basically invented.
When my grandson started playing cello in middle school orchestra, I naturally had to show him the clip from “Take the Money and Run” where Woody plays cello in the marching band. That gag still cracks me up.
I agree that parts of it are dated - the part where Howard Cosell covers his wedding night on Wide World of Sports is funny because I have seen WWoS, but the part where he walks into the restaurant to order food for the rebels still cracks me up.
Allen peaked with Annie Hall, but his earlier stuff, where he just tried to be funny and establish the neurotic Jewish nebbish, worked on the level it tried to. Whining to be funny is one thing - whining like he did in Stardust Memories is just self-indulgent and boring.
I have never been able to figure out if Interiors is a deadpan comedy.
I’d agree that Allen created a fairly innovative character, one that probably hadn’t been seen in movies much before he came along. But that doesn’t mean that the gags he used in a movie like Bananas were new. aldiboronti suggests that a lot of them had been around long before 1971, and that would be my sense too.
I haven’t seen Bananas in a really long time. I enjoyed it when I saw it, but I could easily imagine that much of it seems to miss the mark today.
I thought the OP’s comment about gags being telegraphed long before they arrived was telling. I remember seeing a trailer for one of Allen’s more recent movies (okay, it was probably 10-15 years ago, i haven’t been keeping up), and there was a setup IN THE TRAILER for a fairly dumb joke that you could indeed see coming a mile away. Lots of buildup, little payoff, and it wasn’t even done well. So that big buildup for a joke “you can see coming a mile away” might well be a hallmark of Allen’s.
I don’t know whether we want more subtlety now, or whether we demand better punchlines today from jokes that get that much buildup, or whether we look at Allen’s character which seemed so fresh back then and say “yeah, well, that’s nice, but that’s not enough to make up for a pretty lame gag,” or what; but it seems like back in '71 we may have been more willing to sit through a long buildup when we knew what was coming. That might very well be part of the difference in how a movie like Bananas might be perceived at different times.
–Apropos of nothing: My mother-in-law went to high school with Woody Allen before he became Woody Allen, She didn’t know him well at all, but he once made a remark about having to go to his after-school job, and she asked what kind of work he did, and he said “Oh, I write jokes for comedians,” and she smiled and said, “Cool,” or the early fifties equivalent, but what she remembers thinking is “You? Writing jokes? But you’re not funny…”
Woody was known for having more jokes than in normal comedies then. It was madcap anyway. He was the joke machine of his day if anyone was.
I wonder if the OP ever tried to watch a lot of other comedies made at the same time. I think people aren’t considering that what we are seeing now is a function of their own eyes and not the movie they’re watching, in the context it was made.
Woodys job was to make those movies. It wasn’t to make them funny to people in the same way 50 years later. If they don’t how is that Woody’s doing?
