Lloyd Billingsley draws on Woody Allen’s Bananas (1971) to trace the outline of a mania — the mania of Democrat orthodoxy. I was thinking about Bananas over the weekend as I revisited Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) and reread Kenneth Lynn’s (great) Charlie Chaplin and His Times. Early in Bananas Allen pays tribute to Chaplin and Modern Times.
Allen plays Fielding Mellish, a “research tester” for General Equipment. In the scene below, Mellish is enlisted to show off General Equipment’s forthcoming Execucizer. The Execucizer will promote efficiency and health by letting busy executives get in their exercise “without ever pausing in their crowded work schedule.” In the clip below Mellish displays how it works to a prospective retailer.
Playing an assembly line worker in a futuristic factory, Chaplin made his last film appearance as the Little Tramp in Modern Times. The wacky inventor of a feeding machine “brings a model to the company president’s office and attempts to sell it to him” (as Lynn explains). The machine will let the workers eat while they remain on the assembly line. The assembly line is briefly shut down so the inventor can display how the machine works. The Little Tramp is designated the machine’s guinea pig.
Both Modern Times and Bananas are still funny after all these years.
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