Lionel Rogosin was exhausted after the difficult experience of his third feature, Good Times, Wonderful Times, and greatly in need of a dose of cathartic laughter – such as he had enjoyed with his friends Edward “Swede” Sorensen and Dean Preece while in college. Even though neither of them had ever imagined ending up in a film, Rogosin nonetheless invited them to join his latest venture. Over the course of a weekend in January 1966, they met up in Sorensen’s house in Madison, Connecticut and, fuelled by alcohol, improvised a scathing and wacky sketch about a pastor seeking finance and a banker newly arrived in town. The resulting short would acquire the title How Do You Like Them Bananas? Rogosin was so pleased with the result that he decided to double down and once more make use of the same two protagonists and the same approach: no screenplay, no central plot, no overarching logic. And lots of liquor. This time around, he added a feminine touch to the party, in the guise of Molly Parkin, a fashion editor from Swinging London who had already shone in Good Times, Wonderful Times (and who would go on to be a risqué novelist, a TV personality banned from the BBC for her propensity for bad language, and a painter). The result was Oysters Are in Season, which exists in a variety of different versions, none of which are perhaps definitive. It is a delirious mishmash comprising: gastrointestinal upsets, the eating of 16mm film, surreal TV interviews, an erratic evening-by-candlelight, a bather who thinks he is a seal, an exotic idyll precariously balanced on a hammock, and a masochistic method for learning golf. Not to mention the widely requested return of the banker and priest from the previous film.

Andrea Meneghelli