In Bananas, Woody Allen plays Fielding Mellish, a professional gadget tester who, in an effort to impress student political activist Nancy (Lasser, Allen's second wife), joins the rebels in the fictional South American country of San Marcos.

The rebels unexpectedly win power and Mellish is sent to New York to negotiate an aid package, where he again meets Nancy. She does not recognise him in his new Castro-like guise of South American revolutionary, but the FBI does. Things get sillier from here on.

This is one of Allen's early movies after he decided to take full control of film production following his unsatisfactory experiences as a script writer (Casino Royale, What's New Pussycat). Typical of his early films, Bananas is filled with one-liners and a style of comedy that is more slapstick and bizarre than his later flicks, and also less autobiographical. It is typical of the movies that people would refer to later on when they asked him 'Why don't you make funny movies like you used to?' However, it was the experience gained in making these films that led to more insightful dramatic works, such as Annie Hall.

I haven't seen this film for many, many years, and I admit I'm rather hazy on the details of it (except for Gene Wilder and the sheep). When I did some research on the internet, all sorts of things started to come back to me ((ndash)) the court jester; the giant rampaging breast; the heavy meal of pasta ((ndash)) and I remembered that this film is perhaps Woody Allen's most surreal, most off-beat, and most spuriously based on a best-seller. You may not know this, but Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* was a widely (if not feverishly, though certainly furtively) read book in the 1960s, which purported to answer the sorts of questions that washed up in the wake of the sexual revolution: 'What Happens During Ejaculation?', for instance. The answer in the book need not concern us here; the answer in the film stars Allen as a sperm and Burt Reynolds as part of the brain, which facts ought to render the rest of this review irrelevant.