Love and Death (1975)
Directed by Woody Allen
In czarist Russia, a neurotic soldier and his distant cousin formulate a plot to assassinate Napoleon.
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What critics compared Love and Death to
Initially, watching Affleck in a big white sheet reminded me of Woody Allen’s encounters with Death in Love and Death but the simplicity of the stricken soul moving about literally undercover begins to take on real power.
The more anarchic entries, featuring W.C. Fields, the Marx brothers, and later, Woody Allen, portrayed rebellion against the system and, in Allen’s case, his character’s demise (in 1975’s Love and Death).
Neither of these ideas is especially original (the latter approach, a tonal sensibility, has fueled many a fish-out-of-water historical comedy, like Woody Allen basically plunking his 20th-century nebbish into czarist Russia for Love and Death), but together, they're a start.
At the end of Love and Death (1975) Woody Allen concludes that if God exists, while he may not be evil, he could be termed an underachiever.
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More simply, you could say that the “eternal sunshine of the spotless mind” is about on par with Woody Allen’s response to Diane Keaton’s ruminations that the village idiot in Love and Death seems happy enough (“It’s pretty easy to be happy when your major concern in life is how much saliva to dribble.”)
It's the light mockery of somebody who knows what he's talking about and loves the object of his parody; it's humor for the well-read, though probably not as daunting as Allen's Love and Death in that regard (anyone likely to see a Woody Allen movie probably knows why painting Hemingway as a monosyllabic violence freak is at least conceptually funny).
The movie's posh English soap spirals down a rusty St. Petersburg drain, yet it lacks the almost shrugging wit of Altman's murder scheme in "Gosford Park" (and the brash wit of Allen's Russian spoof, "Love and Death").
You can hear it in the dialogue: Chloe and Tom's cocktail-swizzling mother (Penelope Wilton, rounding out the film's trifecta of demeaning roles for good actresses) doesn't much care for Chris, but dad (Brian Cox), a good-natured sort, seems to think he's OK: Defending the lad, he says, "We had a very interesting conversation about Dostoevski," which, when you write it down, sounds like a line from "Love and Death," although it's meant in complete seriousness.
Annie Hall is refreshing because it showed an astonishing leap in creativity, exploration, and cinematic curiosity from Allen's previous film, the very funny but flat Love and Death.
Previous movies such as the mock Russian literature epic "Love and Death" are funnier but are only really a sequence of gags.
After skewing Russian literature (Love and Death), political leaders (Bananas), and future nostalgia (Sleeper) in broad comedies, it was as if Woody said, “Okay, you’ve seen that I can be funny, now it’s time to get to know me a little bit.”
The comic level of Annie Hall is not as high or frantic as in Allen's Sleeper or Love and Death.
A culmination and a transition, refining the spray-gun approach of Sleeper en route to Annie Hall, and, like Twain's The Innocents Abroad or Jones' What's Opera, Doc?, an act of artistic debunking that reassures the importance of art.