It’s time to announce the latest additions to 4xblu’s online store offerings, which consist of Abel Ferrara’s “Pasolini” and two of Woody Allen’s “early, funny” efforts: “Bananas” and “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask.”
After establishing himself as a successful and influential stand-up comedian during the early-to-mid 60s, Woody Allen’s directorial career began with “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?” — a project for which he was supposedly paid $66,000 to take a Japanese James Bond ripoff and write an entirely new script that would be overdubbed on top of the original footage. Initially intended as a one hour television special, the film’s producers added some extra footage and a few musical numbers by the Lovin’ Spoonful to pad out the runtime and released “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?” theatrically, which prompted Allen to take legal action. Allen’s next effort, his first as an actor, writer, and director, was the “Bonnie and Clyde”-esque mockumentary “Take the Money and Run,” which won a writer’s guild award for Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen.
Allen’s next feature, “Bananas,” was the third and last film that he would co-write with Mickey Rose. In the film he plays Fielding Mellish, a product tester who goes to great lengths to impress a politically active girl (played by Allen’s then-ex-wife Louise Lasser; the pair had parted the previous year) with whom he’s fallen in love. After she dumps him, Mellish decides to follow through on a trip to South America that they’d planned, and thanks to an odd bit of circumstance he becomes enmeshed in the political situation in the fictional country of San Marcos, whose military takeover is handled in the opening scene like a championship boxing match. Featuring an homage to Eisenstein and surrealist images that would be at home in a Buñuel film, with “Bananas” Allen demonstrated that he was more than just a gifted gag man.