Banana Joe (1982)

(In French, On Cable TV, August 2019) I’m hardly the first one to remark that cultural cross-pollination is weird, especially when looking at how translation allows works to go from one cultural sphere to another. There’s no real reason why a French-Canadian middle-aged man such as myself would be a fan of Italian comedian Bud Spencer, except for a few economic decisions taken in the mid-1970s. For some reason, many Spencer movies (especially those he shot alongside frequent screen partner Terence Hill) were translated in French and become big hits in French Canada, which ensured that they were mainstays of French-Canadian television as well … which explains how I saw a lot of Spencer/Hill movies in the 1980s. It also explains why those very same movies regularly show up even today on Cable TV channels dedicated to older films. So here we are, nearly thirty years later, with me humming the insanely catchy theme song of Banana Joe as I revisit the film. Spencer was a gentle bear of a comedian, and his larger-than-life appearance also translated in an oversized presence in his films. Banana Joe has him (sans Hill) play a friendly, simple-minded banana farmer forced to get out of his comfortable semirural life to seek a permit in the big city. The usual amount of fish-out-of-water hijinks happen, with the protagonist’s innate goodness overpowering the inhumanity and meanness of so-called civilization. (If you want to write a paper exploring the link between this and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, go ahead—it’s not going to hurt anyone.)  Spencer not only plays the lead, but also co-wrote the script, meaning that it clearly plays to his strengths. The result is not surprising in the slightest, but it does have a comforting feel-good quality that’s hard to dislike—although it probably helps if you have a decades-long sympathy for the roles that Spencer played in dozens of formative films. I really cannot reliably tell you if you’re going to enjoy Banana Joe … but it was a great throwback as far as I’m concerned.