He meets with military dictator Carlos Montalban, who attempts to to murder Allen and blame the death on insurgents. But the rebels prevent the killing. Allen joins their guerilla unit. Two coups result in Allen as the unlikely President of San Marcos. He returns to New York to raise money for his adopted nation, and resumes his relationship with Lasser.
How others will see it. Although Allen would eventually receive more than two dozen Oscar nominations, as a director, writer, or actor, none came before Annie Hall (1977). In fact, Bananas was ignored by the film festivals, since dramas are almost always heralded over screwball comedies. But the movie did well at the box office, and generally drew favorable reviews.
Today at imdb.com, the user ratings are lower than expected at 7.1 out of 10. The 31K user votes confirm it has a following. Women grade it higher (7.6 instead of 7.1), for reasons I cannot fathom. User reviews admit that not every joke works but like it overall ("often hilarious comedy with a few dead spots").
How I felt about it. It is difficult to make a good satirical comedy, but Woody Allen succeeded with Bananas. His output became less and less consistent over time, but during the 1970s, his only dud was Interiors.
It would be easy to say that he became more pretentious as the years passed, and the absence of pretense is why Bananas, Sleeper, and Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex were good. They only tried to be funny.
But the argument fails. There were always digs at politics. Bananas implies (correctly) that the U.S. government supports third world dictators over leftist rebels. And later films tried to be funny, but they fell short. The gift flew after Bullets Over Broadway, and no explanation arises.
But Bananas is a laugh riot, perhaps more so than any other Allen film. It may lack some of the insight into relationships or society found in his later movies, but the gags all work, even if, in retrospect, some of the lines hit too close to home, e.g. "I'm doing a sociological study on perversion. I'm up to advanced child molesting."
Much of the humor is the old fashioned double team of straight man and comic, where Allen is anxious and incompetent, while a series of actors and actresses take turns setting him up for nebbish behavior. Here, Allen is a failure at everything, yet ends up safe and with the girl simply because that is how the Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd silents always turned out.
But Bananas is much more than a rehash of old formulas. It begins with sportscaster Howard Cosell, at the time regarded as a pompous windbag, playing himself as a reporter at a staged assassination. Carlos Montalban, the brother of "Fantasy Island" host Ricardo Montalban, shows up as a military dictator. Sylvester Stallone (in his fourth movie) has an amusing cameo as a subway tough. Those obligated to endure the 1980s sitcoms "Diff'rent Strokes" and "The Facts of Life" will nonetheless enjoy seeing Conrad Bain and Charlotte Rae is minor roles, respectively as a business executive and a surgeon's nurse.
The casting, though, isn't responsible for the film's success. Credit has to go to Woody Allen, who is the lead actor, the director, and cowriter (with Mickey Rose). And if the movie isn't his best work, it is everything that it tries to be: funny.