Love and Death
| Love and Death | |
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original film poster
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| Directed by | Woody Allen |
| Produced by | Charles H. Joffe |
| Written by | Woody Allen |
| Starring | Woody Allen Diane Keaton |
| Music by | non-original music by Sergei Prokofiev |
| Cinematography | Ghislain Cloquet |
| Edited by | Ron Kalish Ralph Rosenblum George Hively |
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Production
company |
Jack Rollins & Charles H. Joffe Productions
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| Distributed by | United Artists |
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Release date
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Running time
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85 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $3 million |
| Box office | $20,123,742 |
Love and Death is a 1975 comedy film by Woody Allen. It is a satire on Russian literature starring Allen and Diane Keaton as Boris and Sonja, Russians living during the Napoleonic Era who engage in mock-serious philosophical debates. Allen considered it the funniest film he had made by that time.
When Napoleon (James Tolkan) invades Austria during the Napoleonic Wars, Boris Grushenko (Woody Allen), a coward and pacifist 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. He returns and marries the recently widowed Sonja, who does not want to marry Boris, 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, and 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 Napoleon at his headquarters in Moscow. Boris and Sonja debate the matter with some degree of philosophical double-talk, 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.
Allen shot the film outside of the United States, in France and Hungary, where he had to deal with bad weather, spoiled negatives, food poisoning, and physical injuries, as well as multi-lingual crews and extras who had difficulty communicating with each other, and with Allen. This made the director swear never to shoot a movie outside the US again. However, starting twenty-one years later, in 1996 with Everyone Says I Love You, Allen did in fact shoot a number of other movies outside the US.
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Wikipedia