Bananas (1971)

Bananas arrives from 1971, a Woody Allen farce about a neurotic New Yorker who loses his activist girlfriend and stumbles into a fictional Latin American revolution. The film's politics are not a program. They are a whoopee cushion. It mocks American foreign aid to strongmen and CIA meddling in banana republics, which gives it a mild anti-establishment streak, but the target is absurdity itself. The jokes land wherever they please, often on the heads of the nearest bystander.

The cast includes Latin actors in Latin roles, and a Black woman appears in court to claim she is J. Edgar Hoover in disguise. These are casting and gag choices from a 1971 ensemble comedy, not a representation agenda. The film has no LGBTQ content, no feminist argument, no climate concern, no body positivity, no neurodivergence framework, and no revisionist history. The San Marcos revolution is invented, so it cannot revise any real record. Women exist mostly as punchlines or plot devices. There is no sermon to deliver. Political content arrives as setup and punchline, not as a lecture.

The film remains a scattershot comedy that treats revolution, marriage, and American bureaucracy as interchangeable sources of silliness. The humor can be corny, bawdy, and chaotic, and it often aims at physical appearance or sexual inadequacy, which places it outside contemporary sensitivity. Yet it is not cruel in a systematic way. It is too anarchic for that. We are left with a relic that occasionally brushes against social consciousness, then runs away before anyone can organize a meeting.