Product Description

No Description Available.
Genre: Feature Film-Comedy
Rating: PG
Release Date: 7-SEP-2004
Media Type: DVD

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4818 in DVD
• Brand: ALLEN,WOODY
• Released on: 2000-07-05
• Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, DVD-Video, Full Screen, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Subtitled in: French, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 85 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
Writer-director Woody Allen's 1975 comedy finds the familiar Allen persona transposed to 19th-century Russia, as a cowardly serf drafted into the war against Napoleon, when all he'd rather do is write poetry and obsess over his beautiful but pretentious cousin (Diane Keaton). A total disaster as a soldier, Allen's cowardice serves him well when he hides in a cannon and is shot into a tent of French soldiers, suddenly making him a national hero. After his cousin agrees to marry him, thinking he'll be killed in a duel he miraculously survives, the couple must hatch a ludicrous plot to assassinate Napoleon in order to keep the coward Allen out of yet another war. Allen and Keaton show what a perfect comic team they make in this film, even predating their most celebrated pairing in Annie Hall. Working so well as the most unlikely of comedies, of all things a hilarious parody of Russian literature, Love and Death is a must-see for fans of Woody Allen films. --Robert Lane

Customer Reviews

Great movie
Though not my favorite Woody Allen film, I would definitely recommend this one. Perhaps not to start, but once you've seen his more iconic films (Annie Hall, Manhattan, etc.). It also helps (but definitely isn't essential) to see some of Bergman's movies, because Allen tends to spoof those a bit. 4 and 1/2 stars.

Good Woody
It's an odd thing to experience art fresh and then re-experience it with greater knowledge about it and its sources. As example, as a Woody Allen fan I'd watched his terrific 1975 satire Love And Death, filmed in Hungary and France, probably ten or twelve times, fully getting all the references to Fyodor Dostoevsky's and Leo Tolstoy's works, but I had never been in the position of viewing the film having knowledge of all the sly European cinema references; especially those which poke fun at Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman's canon.
Love And Death was the last `purely comedic' Woody Allen film before he entered his great Golden Age, starting with 1977's Annie Hall and ending with 1992's Husbands And Wives. It was a romp, or as one of the aliens in 1980's Stardust Memories said, `We enjoy your films. Particularly the early, funny ones.' It was also a great showcase of his comedic talents in synch with those of Diane Keaton. No other foil- male nor female, has ever come close to the chemistry that duo exhibited. Of course, like almost all his films, Allen wrote, as well as directed this film. and it represented a step up from his earlier works, like Bananas, Take The Money And Run, or Sleeper.... The film succeeds and holds relevance today because its references and humor are timeless, but also because it works whether you get the references or not. Thus, it is both low and high comedy, and no one has ever done that better than Woody Allen- be it getting shot out of a canon, or psychobabbling with Diane Keaton over objectivity vs. subjectivity. Yes, it is not as deep and alternately hilarious as later Allen masterpieces like Hannah And Her Sisters or Crimes And Misdemeanors, but it is every bit as enjoyable, and that's more than can be said for the bulk of films out there. Just ask your Village Idiot!

Woody Allen: The Golden Years
"Love and Death" truly belongs in the Pantheon of comedy classics. A send-up of every Russian novel that you should have read, but probably didn't, the film, as the name implies, in particular spoofs Tolstoy's "War and Peace." Boris Gruschenko (Allen in Kulak blouse plus his customary horn-rimmed glasses) is hopelessly in love with his cousin Sonja (Diane Keaton) when the Napoleonic Wars intrude on their lives. Between gags, the characters burst into ecstasies of philosophical discourse on the nature of ontology and wheat. The film was shot in Hungary, and the costumes and sets provide a magnificent background for this high-flown nonsense, as does the musical score by Sergei Prokofiev [who might well be spinning in his grave with laughter]. There are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments even though one has seen the film half-a-dozen times.

Among my favorites is an episode in which Boris' aged parent--a "major loon"--confides that he owns a little plot of land [He keeps it in his pocket.] upon which he is going to build one day, and that he will leave it to his son. Allen also pays homage to Ingmar Bergman's "Seventh Seal" in his dance with a scythe-wielding Death, a frenetic pas de deux with which he ends the movie.

Although I always get a kick out of Allen--even in his later, far lighter, fare--in "Love and Death" he has approached, if not reached, the zenith of his creative powers--his golden age, as it were, in which his movies cast a shadow so long that it adumbrates his later works.