Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (X) and Bananas (A), March 1979

Film Double Bill

BANANAS (A)                                                        U.S.A. (1972) Director Woody Allen

WOODY ALLEN, LOUISE LASSER, HOWARD COSELL, CARLOS MONTALBAN.

ALLEN is an inspired  lunatic.  So many of the jokes and sight gags are hilarious it doesn’t matter – and probably can’t be helped – that a few of them bomb out.  All- purpose film maker and director WOODY plays the role of frustrated inventor working on such needed amenities for a civilised society as an electric warmer for toilets seats (for cold days).  He runs off to South America and becomes a revolutionary leader, and it’s the only American film within memory that makes clear that J. Edgar Hoover really was a black woman.  The spirit of the MARX BROTHERS is alive and well and living in WOODY ALLEN.  (82 mins).

If you still have any strength left, the Main feature of the bill is:

EVERTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT

SEX BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK (X)       USA. (1972) Director Woody Allen

WOODY ALLEN, LOU JACOBI, ANTHONY QUAYLE  GENE WILDER, BURT REYNOLDS, TONY RANDELL.  The most important and inventive comedy talent in American film has borrowed the title of DR. DAVID REUBEN’S best-selling rip off book about sex, and tranformed it into a series of lunatic, hysterical sketches.  They don’t all work, but it doesn’t matter because ordinary ALLEN is funnier than virtually anything else around.  A number of sketches (WOODY does not appear in all of them, though he did conceive and direct the whole mad lot) are excruciatingly funny.  GENE WILDER plays a mild-mannered doctor falling head over heels with one of his patients – an American sheep named Daisy.  Besides that, it’s your only other chance of the filmic week to see a 40 feet high female breast, LYNN REDGRAVE wearing a chastity belt, and a wondrous bit of madness which finds WOODY playing a sperm. (87 mins).

SEATS: 60p and 80p.