alan g
Tolstoy send up. Prokofiev music essential.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
09/02/25
Full Review
john h
Woody Allen's detached, full-of-fun film Love and Death is unlike the rest of his pictures. Still having existential slants like many of his works, they feel more free and enjoyable by both the director, actors and watchers.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
06/05/25
Full Review
Alain E
Frankly, impressive that one person imagined everything that happens and said in this movie. Extremely entertaining. Although we see many faces of love, death remains obscure. I guess Woody Allen wants us to have something to look forward to.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
04/22/25
Full Review
Lanfranco C
Not bad, but overrated.
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
12/06/24
Full Review
David H
I saw this movie when it first came out. I had just moved to Fresno, California, and I was the new kid at school. Some kind individual from the church I attended, whose name was Steve, invited me to see it with him.
***
I knew virtually nothing about Woody Allen at that time, and it wasn’t a film I would have chosen to see. All those years since, I’ve had the impression it was a deep, philosophical film that I would really have needed to have studied Dostoevsky or Tolstoy to have adequately grasped. In the intervening years, I’ve learned a lot more about the world so, when I got the chance to see the film again recently, I jumped at the opportunity because I wondered how my older, better educated self would respond to it.
***
The film was mildly entertaining. I was surprised to learn that the plot wasn't actually very complicated at all, and that it had little or nothing to do with Russian literature. So I'm sure that my 16-year-old self grasped the plot just fine. Sometimes we think we remember something perfectly but then, when we revisit it, it turns out we didn't remember it all that well after all. Chalk this up to just another instance of that.
***
A couple of things surprised me about the film. First, Woody's character makes some comment in a conversation with Sonja (or possibly another character) about how the love between two women is his very favorite kind. I don't think I would have had any idea what he was talking about at that time, so the comment probably just sailed right over my head back then. This time, I was a little shocked or, at the very least, surprised.
***
Even more shocking, however, was another scene where a rabbi, if I remember right, makes a comment about how good it can be to have two 12-year-old girls. I don't remember exactly how he expressed it, but the meaning was clear. You certainly couldn't get away with a comment like that in a movie today, and I'm actually surprised that they were able to get away with it then. (In his next film, Annie Hall, the reference was to two sixteen-year-old twins. Slightly less unacceptable perhaps, but certainly not anywhere near tolerable in today’s climate.)
***
In any case, this was Allen’s last movie before Annie Hall and a string of other hits that came in the late ‘70s and into the ‘80s. And it wasn’t a great film, so it's not surprising that it's not widely available. The only way I could get it was to rent a VHS copy from the university library in my town, whereas his better known films are available on DVD, BlueRay and several different streaming services.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
10/06/24
Full Review
Matthew B
The title of Woody Allen's final film from his ‘funny' period is one that could have been applied to almost any film that Allen made. It reflects two of his leading neurotic preoccupations – the need for love, and the suffering that it causes; and the transitory nature of life that ends in a question mark.
These themes are so universal that Allen can bring them into any of his works without difficulty. Indeed the subject matter of Love and Death, a movie set in nineteenth-century Russia, is eerily similar to that of his previous movie, Sleeper, where the action takes place in America 200 years in the future.
The reason why this particular film has the title Love and Death is that Allen is thinking about Russian literature, and the title carries echoes of a number of famous Russian novels, notably Crime and Punishment and War and Peace. The latter novel is the single biggest influence on the film.
The jokes that Allen makes offer no condescension to the viewer. He assumes in advance that he can bring in as much intellectual content as he likes, or that he can throw in a nod to other works, and that the audience will either get the reference, or still find it funny without knowing the context.
Even the slapstick humour is modelled on that of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and the throwaway jokes recall Bob Hope and the Marx Brothers. While there are plenty of gags that are amusing in themselves, others have a strong literary meaning. Aside from War and Peace, Allen throws in allusions to works by Chekhov and Dostoevsky. He even includes a quotation from T.S. Eliot.
The erudite music score is also part of the joke. Allen chooses music by Prokofiev because it sounds sufficiently jaunty to not detract from the comedy in the film. At another point, he uses Beethoven's ‘Spring' violin sonata as the basis of a joke. Two clandestine lovers keep pretending to play the piece when the husband walks in, but they keep forgetting who is playing the piano and who is playing the violin.
Aside from literature and music, Allen includes references to other movies. There are a couple of subtle allusions to Battleship Potemkin, notably an image of a man being shot in the face. Allen copies the imagery and composition of one of his favourite directors, Ingmar Bergman. Boris's conversations with Death recall The Seventh Seal. More subtly, the final scene with Sonia and her cousin is framed in a way that imitates the merging of the two women's faces in Persona.
In some ways, Love and Death looks like an arthouse film, but Allen is using the language of the art movie for comic purposes. There are dreams scenes, cod-philosophical discussions and lyrical passages, but all of these are used as the basis for a joke.
The film is peppered with similar mock-gloomy comments. "To love is to suffer", "What if we're just a bunch of absurd people who are running around with no rhyme or reason?" "Life is unbearable", "I'm just racked with guilt and I'm consumed with remorse and stricken with suffering for the human race."
Of course we do not take any of these observations seriously, because they are in context amusing and undermined by surrounding jokes. In any case, while Woody Allen might be slipping a few of his own neurotic observations about life into the story, Love and Death does not feel depressing. Allen's film is told with verve, and a genuine delight in making the movie as funny as he can. To my mind, it is the best of his early comedies.
I wrote a longer appreciation of Love and Death on my blog page if you would like to read more: https://themoviescreenscene.wordpress.com/2020/10/22/love-and-death-1975/
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
08/28/23
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