Bananas

1971. USA. Directed by Woody Allen. Screenplay by Allen, Mickey Rose. With Allen, Louise Lasser, Carlos Montalban. Among Allen's films, Bananas is perhaps most deeply rooted in the tradition of American comedy, from the silent slapstick humor of Chaplin and the Keystone Cops to the verbal wit of Groucho Marx, Bob Hope, and W. C. Fields. Allen plays Fielding Mellish (a Marxist name, that), a nebbishy product tester, who hopes to get lucky with a perky liberal activist but ends up unwittingly joining a group of guerilla revolutionaries in a South American banana republic. 82 min.