Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13860 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-02-19
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Dubbed, PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: English, German
• Subtitled in: Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish
• Dubbed in: German, Italian, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 81 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
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

Special Features
1.85 Wide Screen
16:9 Wide Screen
DVD 9
French\German\Italian\Spanish
English\German
English
Region 2
Dolby Digital English French German Italian Spanish
Dolby Digital
Original Theatrical Trailer
Interactive Menu
Chapter Selection
Danish\Dutch\English\Finnish\French\German\Italian\Norwegian\Spanish\Swedish

Synopsis
LOVE AND DEATH is Woody Allen's send-up of Russian literature and tongue-in-cheek homage to foreign art films (specifically, THE SEVENTH SEAL). Set in Czarist Russia during the Napoleonic Wars, the story recounts the misadventures of Boris (Allen) and his sexy cousin Sonja (Diane Keaton), culminating in their harebrained attempt to assassinate Napoleon. Through it all, Boris--Allen's usual neurotic nebbish--desperately tries to put the moves on Sonja, who's too busy spouting philosophy to notice.

Customer Reviews

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 bequeath it to his son. Allen also pays homage to Ingmar Bergman's "Seventh Seal" when he ends the film in a frenetic pas de deux with a scythe-wielding Death.

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 cinematic productions cast a shadow so long that it adumbrates his later works.

Fantastic, my favourite Woody Allen film
This is such a funny film. Some of the lines, and the slapstick, are amazingly funny. I've seen it several times and parts of it still crack me up. The film making is also brilliant, and the use of music fits astoundingly well. Most of all, though, it makes me laugh like nobody's business.

I LOVE this film to DEATH
Never mind the plot because it peters out into nothing in the end. It's a good setting and the plot is clear, but Napoleon isn't killed along with a lot of shananigans at the end of the film. This renders it a series of connected scenes more than a story. You will forgive this disappointment because the film is so funny and brilliant. In fact, the scene in which Boris can kill Napoleon is plain excruciating. This could be a positive excrutiation for some, but for me it's too sexist and annoying. You have to admit that no matter how much you love 'im, Woody is obsessed with sex and a certain view of it and this can make him a bit tedious for the very people in the audience (hot young women) that he's centering things on.

This film gets five out of five for me because it is so enjoyable. It's not just that it makes you laugh, it's that it makes you agogue at ideas and works on a deep level. What a good title! He doesn't cover every single angle of the debate about love and death, but he does a good job. Woody's acting makes this supremely sensitive transmission of ideas possible. He's a genius! His acting is more trite in future films but here it is fresh and expressive. A raised eyebrow is so well-timed. Even the look in his eye.

I like the way he talks to Death who just passes through with his latest victim and I love the humour of extremely philosophical dialogue, so that you have a philosophical review and the feeling of being a fly on the wall to the human condition which is partly why we laugh so much.

Yup! I would say it's a philosophical and humanistic film that reaches the parts that other films don't reach. I'd even put it up there as a spiritual treatise. It's sympathetic, therapeutic and wonderfully balmy.