''Love and Death'' is a 1975 American

comedy film A comedy film is a category of film which emphasizes humor. These films are designed to make the audience laugh through amusement. Films in this style traditionally have a happy ending ( black comedy being an exception). Comedy is one of the o ...

written and directed by

Woody Allen Heywood "Woody" Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg; November 30, 1935) is an American film director, writer, actor, and comedian whose career spans more than six decades and multiple Academy Award-winning films. He began his career writing ...

. It is a

satire Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of shaming o ...

Russian literature Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia and its émigrés and to Russian-language literature. The roots of Russian literature can be traced to the Middle Ages, when epics and chronicles in Old East Slavic were composed. By the ...

starring Allen and Diane Keaton as Boris and Sonja, Russians living during the

Napoleonic Era The Napoleonic era is a period in the history of France and Europe. It is generally classified as including the fourth and final stage of the French Revolution, the first being the National Assembly, the second being the Legislativ ...

who engage in mock-serious philosophical debates. Allen considered it the funniest film he had made up until that point.

Plot

When

Napoleon Napoleon Bonaparte ; it, Napoleone Bonaparte, ; co, Napulione Buonaparte. (born Napoleone Buonaparte; 15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821), later known by his regnal name Napoleon I, was a French military commander and political leader wh ...

( James Tolkan) invades Austria during the

Napoleonic Wars The Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) were a series of major global conflicts pitting the French Empire and its allies, led by Napoleon I, against a fluctuating array of European states formed into various coalitions. It produced a period of Fre ...

, Boris Grushenko (

), a coward and

pacifist Pacifism is the opposition or resistance to war, militarism (including conscription and mandatory military service) or violence. Pacifists generally reject theories of Just War. The word ''pacifism'' was coined by the French peace campai ...

scholar, is forced to enlist in the Russian army. Desperate and disappointed after hearing the news that Sonja ( Diane Keaton), his cousin twice removed, is to wed a herring merchant, he inadvertently becomes a war hero. Boris returns and marries the recently widowed Sonja, who does not want to marry him, but promises him that she will, in order to make him happy for one night, when she thinks that he is about to be killed in a duel. To her surprise and disappointment, he survives the duel. Their marriage is filled with philosophical debates but no money. Their life together is interrupted when Napoleon invades the Russian Empire. Boris wants to flee but his wife, angered that the invasion will interfere with their plans to start a family that year, conceives a plot to

assassinate Assassination is the murder of a prominent or important person, such as a head of state, head of government, politician, world leader, member of a royal family or CEO. The murder of a celebrity, activist, or artist, though they may not have a ...

Napoleon at his headquarters in Moscow. Boris and Sonja debate the matter with some degree of philosophical

doublespeak Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms (e.g., "downsizing" for layoffs and "servicing the target" for bombing), in which case it is ...

, and Boris reluctantly goes along with it. They fail to kill Napoleon and Sonja escapes arrest while Boris is executed, despite being told by a vision that he will be pardoned. Boris' ghost bids goodbye to Sonja and the audience before dancing away with

Death Death is the irreversible cessation of all biological functions that sustain an organism. For organisms with a brain, death can also be defined as the irreversible cessation of functioning of the whole brain, including brainstem, and brain ...

Cast

as Boris Grushenko * Diane Keaton as Sonja * James Tolkan as

* Harold Gould as Anton lvanovich Lebedokov *

Olga Georges-Picot Olga Georges-Picot (6 January 1940 – 19 June 1997) was a French actress. She was a great-niece of François Georges-Picot. Early life Born in Shanghai, in Japanese-occupied China, she was the daughter of Guillaume Georges-Picot, the French A ...

as Countess Alexandrovna *

Beth Porter Beth Jane Porter (born May 23, 1942) is an American stage, film and television actress and writer, who has worked in Britain for most of her career. She became a British citizen in 2014. Early life Beth Porter made her first professional appea ...

as Anna *

Zvee Scooler Zvee Scooler (December 1, 1899 – March 25, 1985) was a Russian-born United States, American actor and radio commentator. He was born in Kamianets-Podilskyi, Kamenets-Podolsky (now Ukraine). He performed in both Yiddish language, Yiddish and Engl ...

as Father * Jessica Harper as Natasha * Féodor Atkine as Mikhail Grushenko * Despo Diamantidou as Boris' mother * Yves Barsacq as Rimsky * Yves Brainville as Andre * Brian Coburn as Dimitri *

Tony Jay Tony Jay (2 February 1933 – 13 August 2006) was a British actor. A former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, he was known for his voice work in radio, animation, film, and video games. Jay was particularly noted for his distinctive bari ...

as Vladimir Maximovitch *

Howard Vernon Howard Vernon (15 July 1908 – 25 July 1996) was a Swiss actor. In 1961, he became a favorite actor of Spanish film director Jesús Franco and began starring in many low-budget horror and erotic films produced in Spain and France. After po ...

as Gen. Leveque * Aubrey Morris as Soldier 4 * Alfred Lutter as Young Boris * Georges Adet as Old Nehamkin * Sol Frieder as Voskovec *

Lloyd Battista Lloyd McAteer Battista (born May 14, 1937, in Cleveland, Ohio) is a retired American actor and screenwriter. Biography Battista studied acting at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He was active on Broadway and off-Broadway stages, appearing in ...

as Don Francisco * Frank Adu as Drill Sergeant

Production

Allen shot the film in France and Hungary, where he had to deal with unfavorable weather, spoiled negatives, food poisoning, physical injuries and communication difficulties. Consequently, he swore never to shoot a film outside the United States again. However, starting in 1996 with '' Everyone Says I Love You'', Allen did in fact shoot a number of films abroad.

Style

Coming between Allen's '' Sleeper'' (1973) and ''

Annie Hall ''Annie Hall'' is a 1977 American satirical romantic comedy-drama film directed by Woody Allen from a screenplay written by him and Marshall Brickman, and produced by Allen's manager, Charles H. Joffe. The film stars Allen as Alvy Singer, w ...

'' (1977), ''Love and Death'' is in many respects an artistic transition between the two. Allen pays tribute to the humor of The Marx Brothers,

Bob Hope Leslie Townes "Bob" Hope (May 29, 1903 – July 27, 2003) was a British-American comedian, vaudevillian, actor, singer and dancer. With a career that spanned nearly 80 years, Hope appeared in more than 70 short and feature films, with ...

and

Charlie Chaplin Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin Jr. (16 April 188925 December 1977) was an English comic actor, filmmaker, and composer who rose to fame in the era of silent film. He became a worldwide icon through his screen persona, the Tramp, and is conside ...

throughout the film. The dialogue and scenarios

parody A parody, also known as a spoof, a satire, a send-up, a take-off, a lampoon, a play on (something), or a caricature, is a creative work designed to imitate, comment on, and/or mock its subject by means of satiric or ironic imitation. Often its sub ...

Russian novels, particularly those by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, such as ''

The Brothers Karamazov ''The Brothers Karamazov'' (russian: Братья Карамазовы, ''Brat'ya Karamazovy'', ), also translated as ''The Karamazov Brothers'', is the last novel by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky spent nearly two years writing '' ...

'', ''

Crime and Punishment ''Crime and Punishment'' ( pre-reform Russian: ; post-reform rus, Преступление и наказание, Prestupléniye i nakazániye, prʲɪstʊˈplʲenʲɪje ɪ nəkɐˈzanʲɪje) is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. ...

'', '' The Gambler'', ''

The Idiot ''The Idiot'' ( pre-reform Russian: ; post-reform rus, Идиот, Idiót) is a novel by the 19th-century Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. It was first published serially in the journal ''The Russian Messenger'' in 1868–69. The title is an ...

'' and ''

War and Peace ''War and Peace'' (russian: Война и мир, translit=Voyna i mir; pre-reform Russian: ; ) is a literary work by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy that mixes fictional narrative with chapters on history and philosophy. It was first published ...

''. This includes a dialogue between Boris and his father in which each line alludes to, or is composed entirely of, Dostoyevsky titles. The use of Prokofiev on the soundtrack adds to the Russian flavor of the film. Prokofiev's " Troika" from the '' Lieutenant Kijé Suite'' is featured prominently, for the film's opening and

closing credits Closing credits or end credits are a list of the cast and crew of a particular motion picture, television program, or video game. Where opening credits appear at the beginning of a work, closing credits appear close to, or at the very end of a ...

and in selected scenes in the film when a "bouncy" theme is required. The battle scene is accompanied with music from Prokofiev's ''Alexander Nevsky'' cantata. Boris is marched to his execution to the "March" from Prokofiev's '' The Love for Three Oranges''. Some of the humor is straightforward; other jokes rely on the viewer's awareness of classic literature or contemporary European cinema. For example, the final shot of Keaton is a reference to

Ingmar Bergman Ernst Ingmar Bergman (14 July 1918 – 30 July 2007) was a Swedish film director, screenwriter, producer and playwright. Widely considered one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time, his films are known as "profoun ...

's '' Persona''. The sequence with the stone lions is a parody of

Sergei Eisenstein Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (russian: Сергей Михайлович Эйзенштейн, p=sʲɪrˈɡʲej mʲɪˈxajləvʲɪtɕ ɪjzʲɪnˈʂtʲejn, 2=Sergey Mikhaylovich Eyzenshteyn; 11 February 1948) was a Soviet film director, scree ...

's ''

Battleship Potemkin '' Battleship Potemkin'' (russian: Бронено́сец «Потёмкин», ''Bronenosets Potyomkin''), sometimes rendered as ''Battleship Potyomkin'', is a 1925 Soviet silent drama film produced by Mosfilm. Directed and co-written by S ...

'', while the Russian battle against Napoleon's army heavily parodies the same film's "Odessa steps" sequence. Bergman's '' The Seventh Seal'' is parodied several times, including during the climax.

Reception

The film grossed over $20 million in North America, making it the 18th highest grossing picture of 1975 in North America (theatrical rentals were $5 million). At

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wan ...

, 21 out of 21 critics—including three of the site's "top critics"—consider the film "fresh", with a 100% rating and a weighted average of 8.13/10. The site's consensus reads: "Woody Allen plunks his neurotic persona into a Tolstoy pastiche and yields one of his funniest films, brimming with slapstick ingenuity and a literary inquiry into subjects as momentous as ''Love and Death''". At the

25th Berlin International Film Festival The 25th annual Berlin International Film Festival was held from 27 June – 8 July 1975. The Golden Bear was awarded to the Hungarian film ''Adoption'' directed by Márta Mészáros. The retrospective dedicated to Greta Garbo was shown at the ...

in 1975, the film won the Silver Bear for outstanding artistic contribution.

Roger Ebert Roger Joseph Ebert (; June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013) was an American film critic, film historian, journalist, screenwriter, and author. He was a film critic for the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, Ebert beca ...

gave it three and a half stars:

Miss Keaton is very good in ''Love and Death'', perhaps because here she gets to establish and develop a character, instead of just providing a foil, as she's often done in other Allen films ... There are dozens of little moments when their looks have to be exactly right, and they almost always are. There are shadings of comic meaning that could have gotten lost if all we had were the words, and there are whole scenes that play off facial expressions. It's a good movie to watch just for that reason, because it's been done with such care, love and lunacy.

Gene Siskel Eugene Kal Siskel (January 26, 1946 – February 20, 1999) was an American film critic and journalist for the '' Chicago Tribune''. Along with colleague Roger Ebert, he hosted a series of movie review programs on television from 1975 until his ...

awarded a full four stars and wrote, "Woody Allen is simply terrific in 'Love and Death.' To my mind, it's his funniest film. He plays to his greatest strength (gag line dialog) and stays away from what has limited his other movies (an attempt to develop a story)."

Vincent Canby Vincent Canby (July 27, 1924 – October 15, 2000) was an American film and theatre critic who served as the chief film critic for ''The New York Times'' from 1969 until the early 1990s, then its chief theatre critic from 1994 until his death in ...

of ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' called the film "Woody Allen's grandest work" and "side-splitting."

Charles Champlin Charles Davenport Champlin (March 23, 1926 – November 16, 2014) was an American film critic and writer. Life and career Champlin was born in Hammondsport, New York. He attended high school in Camden, New York, working as a columnist for the ...

of the ''

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the ...

'' declared, "Thin but likable just about sums it up." Gary Arnold of ''

The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large n ...

'' found the film "funny with remarkable and delightful consistency."

Penelope Gilliatt Penelope Gilliatt (; born Penelope Ann Douglass Conner; 25 March 1932 – 9 May 1993) was an English novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and film critic. As one of the main film critics for ''The New Yorker'' magazine in the 1960s an ...

of ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...

'' thought that Woody Allen and Diane Keaton "have become an unbeatable new team at pacing haywire intellectual backchat. Their style works as if each of them were a less mock-assertive

Groucho Marx Julius Henry "Groucho" Marx (; October 2, 1890 – August 19, 1977) was an American comedian, actor, writer, stage, film, radio, singer, television star and vaudeville performer. He is generally considered to have been a master of quick wit an ...

with a duplicate of him to play against. For such a recklessly funny film, the impression is weirdly serene." Geoff Brown of '' The Monthly Film Bulletin'' wrote that "the occasional longueurs and dud jokes never prove fatal to the movie's overall success; to use the description Boris applies to his father, Woody Allen is a 'major loon' and ''Love and Death'' provides a fine showcase for his talent." In September 2008, in a poll held by ''

Empire An empire is a "political unit" made up of several territories and peoples, "usually created by conquest, and divided between a dominant center and subordinate peripheries". The center of the empire (sometimes referred to as the metropole) ex ...

'' magazine, the film was voted as the 301st greatest film out of a list of 500. In October 2013, the film was voted by the ''

Guardian Guardian usually refers to: * Legal guardian, a person with the authority and duty to care for the interests of another * ''The Guardian'', a British daily newspaper (The) Guardian(s) may also refer to: Places * Guardian, West Virginia, Unit ...

'' readers as the seventh-best film directed by Woody Allen. Comedian and filmmaker

Bill Hader William Thomas Hader Jr.''Finding Your Roots'', January 26, 2016, PBS. (born June 7, 1978) is an American actor, comedian, writer, and producer. He is the creator, producer, writer, director, and star of the HBO dark comedy series ''Barry'' (201 ...

talked about his appreciation of the film, having listed it as one of his favorite films saying, "I love Diane Keaton in this movie so much. My first real movie crush. It’s nonstop jokes, but its played very real and loose, and it has the starkness of a Bergman movie! It’s insane, yet it completely works."

Soundtrack

*'' The Magic Flute Overture'', K620 (1791) by

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 17565 December 1791), baptised as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period. Despite his short life, his rapid pace of composition r ...

*'' Lieutenant Kijé Suite'' for Orchestra, Op. 60 (1934) by

Sergei Prokofiev Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev; alternative transliterations of his name include ''Sergey'' or ''Serge'', and ''Prokofief'', ''Prokofieff'', or ''Prokofyev''., group=n (27 April .S. 15 April1891 – 5 March 1953) was a Russian composer, ...

*''

Alexander Nevsky Alexander Yaroslavich Nevsky (russian: Александр Ярославич Невский; ; 13 May 1221 – 14 November 1263) served as Prince of Novgorod (1236–40, 1241–56 and 1258–1259), Grand Prince of Kiev (1236–52) and Gran ...

'', Cantata for Mezzo-soprano, Chorus, & Orchestra, Op. 78 (1938) by Sergei Prokofiev *'' The Love for Three Oranges'', Suite for Orchestra, Op. 33 (1919) by Sergei Prokofiev * String Quintet in E, Op. 13 No. 5: III. Minuet by Luigi Boccherini *'' Scythian Suite'', for Orchestra, Op. 20 by Sergei Prokofiev

References

External links

* * * * {{Authority control 1975 films 1975 comedy films 1970s English-language films 1970s parody films American parody films Films directed by Woody Allen Films produced by Charles H. Joffe Films set in the 1810s Films set in Russia Films shot in France Films shot in Hungary Films with screenplays by Woody Allen Napoleonic Wars films Silver Bear for outstanding artistic contribution United Artists films 1970s American films