When Woody Allen released Bananas in 1971, it was greeted with a benevolent review by legendary film critic Vincent Canby of The New York Times, which concluded: “Any movie that attempts to mix together love, the 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.” After the critical appreciation of Allen’s first film, Take the Money and Run, MGM contacted him to make an adaptation of Richard Powell’s comic novel Don Quixote, U.S.A. Allen’s first idea was to turn it into a short story, which got turned down by both Robert Morse and The New Yorker. Consequently, Allen re-wrote the story into a film.  If you’ve never seen the film, Bananas, Canby’s synopsis gives you a good idea of the texture of it: pure hilarity. Allen catapults himself out of Take the Money and Run and, gathering both momentum and confidence, pulls off scenes that were too absurdist to try in his first creative endeavor, including the above mentioned scene where Allen goes into town to order food for his whole troupe of rebels and begins with ordering 1,000 grilled cheese sandwiches. This scene is exemplary of Allen’s increasingly bold emulations of his comedic idols: The Marx Brothers; Charlie Chaplin; and Bob Hope. In this case, the sandwich passage is highly reminiscent of the famous Marx Brothers “stateroom scene” where Groucho orders an enormous amount of food (mostly eggs) to his tiny ship cabin in A Night at the Opera.