In his third film as director, Allen plays a clumsy, anxiety-ridden New Yorker who tries to impress his political activist girlfriend by becoming a South American revolutionary. ‘Blood!’ says Allen, feeling his head. ‘That should be on the inside.’ He has just made contact with Latin American rebels, his first step towards becoming a pint-size Fidel Castro. This is Allen’s most Marxist film – i.e. the funniest send-up of political revolution since Duck Soup. It also lampoons American justice in a trial sequence starring Miss America and a black, transvestite J. Edgar Hoover, in which Woody crumbles under his own cross-examination.

Allen: ‘Bananas was still a film where I only cared about being funny, so if I shot or edited certain scenes almost cartoon-like, it was for that reason. I started to feel that there are certain films I make that are best described as cartoons.’