Moving outside television’s friendly confines 

Watching Woody Allen’s Bananas recently reminded me of how the theatre audience reacted in 1971 when Howard Cosell came onscreen. Laughter and applause, even before he said a single word. 

Back when there were only seven channels, television – not unlike radio – was a place you could visit everyday where you built a connection with the news anchors, sports and weather reporters, sometimes actors and actresses. They were familiar faces, sometimes friendly, sometimes annoying, and when they occasionally earned a paycheck by appearing in a movie, seeing them on a big screen was akin to finding coworkers that you only knew from your job waiting for you inside your house. Or that time you came across one of your teachers in the supermarket. 

Bananas is the king of unexpected TV cameos. Whether because they were cheaper to hire or just available since much of the movie was filmed in New York, along with Cosell you’ll find Don Dunphy, who covered boxing matches on ABC’s Wide World of Sports; New York City news anchor Roger Grimsby; and Ricardo Montalban’s brother Carlos, El Exigente, the coffee fascist from the Savarin commercials. 

He's playing himself, but Cosell is terrific here; very Cosellian:

James Karen was an accomplished character actor with more than 200 credits. But for 28 years he was the spokesman for Pathmark Supermarkets, whose commercials were ubiquitous on New York City TV. In All The President’s Men, Karen plays a lawyer in a brief scene ushering his client out of a courthouse. Nobody applauded when Nixon gets taken down at the end of the film. James Karen got the cheers when he came onscreen. 

They had no lines, and their appearance is only for a few seconds, but when the Three Stooges popped onscreen as firemen in It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, there was a burst of laughter from us kids in the audience. We knew them almost entirely from television (although I did see The Three Stooges Meet Hercules in the movies, with the real Stooges live on stage doing some schtick and introducing the film. Yes, I saw the Stooges -- albeit with Curly Joe -- in person), and they were certainly much more recognizable to us than say Sid Caesar. 

Bill Cardille, a wrestling announcer back in the pre-cable days when televised wrestling was relegated to late Saturday night, played a news reporter in Night of the Living Dead. Watching the film in a near-empty theatre on a snowy weeknight, we yelled out his name when he came onscreen. It’s Cardille who interviews the local sheriff in the film: “Are they slow moving, chief?” “Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up.” 

Another familiar face from television was George Reeves. Even with all the drama of From Here to Eternity, the biggest reaction from our high school English class watching the movie was when Reeves, in a minor role, came onscreen. We all knew him, even without the cape.