69Bananas (1971)

Part of the “early Woody Allen” canon and the filmmaker’s second collaboration with Mickey Rose after Take the Money and the Run. This time Allen played the hapless and sex-starved Fielding Mellish, a New York Jew who joins a band of revolutionaries to impress his leftist girlfriend; naturally, Fielding becomes a Che Guevara-like leader. The script began life as a short story Allen wrote called “El Weirdo,” which, the lore goes, New Yorker magazine's William Shawn rejected because it lampooned Guevara. “Any movie that attempts to mix together love, Cuban revolution, the C.I.A., Jewish mothers, J. Edgar Hoover and a few other odds and ends (including a sequence in which someone orders 1,000 grilled cheese sandwiches) is bound to be a little weird – and most welcome,” Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times. Howard Cosell also appears, doing a bedside interview on Fielding’s wedding night.