Rent Love and Death (1975)

Tolstoy, But Make It Keaton - Love and Death review by griggs

I’d always assumed Love and Death would be “classic Woody”: a fairly straight story, the Annie Hall/Manhattan kind of lane, just in fancy dress. Instead it’s a Russian-lit spoof in Napoleonic-era chaos mode — the plot slipping on banana skins while everyone keeps talking like they’ve read too much philosophy.

When it’s on form, it’s properly funny: brisk one-liners, daft digressions, duels and disasters that land with a satisfying thud. It does drift now and then, and a few jokes feel like they’ve been lobbed in because the film can, but the pace usually snaps it back into shape.

But the real reason it works for me is Diane Keaton. Every time she’s back on screen, the film gets a jolt of electricity — sharp, loose, and completely in command. She does big physical comedy without turning into a cartoon, and the early seduction bit with the rented piano is pure timing and nerve. It’s his film on paper — in practice, she’s the one you follow.

Literary Comedy. - Love and Death review by Steve

This is the film Woody Allen released after Sleeper, so arguably it is a slight backward step, being episodic and a little erratic. But it's still funny and entertaining, and benefits from superior photography and music borrowed from Sergei Prokofiev. This is the last of Woody's early funny ones.

It is a satire inspired by the giants of Russian literature, particularly Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov, but visually this is very much a comic tribute to Ingmar Bergman (which Allen makes explicit at the end when he melts a face and a profile into one image in homage to Persona.

Woody style is to parody intellectualism and then puncture its pretentiousness with a low joke. There are long discussions about philosophy and the absurdity of Being in an indifferent cosmos: 'All men go eventually, but I go six o'clock tomorrow morning. I was supposed to go at five o'clock but I have a smart lawyer.

Woody and Diane Keaton suffer famine and existential trauma, fight a duel and plot to assassinate Napoleon. It's a series of sketches which deliver a blizzard of gags, and some hit and some don't, but the stars make it fun. Woody's schtick in his early films often drew on Bob Hope. Never more than this one.