Woody Allen's imperially funny new picture is named "Love and Death," a coupling of big concepts that says at once where the story is set. We are obviously going to be in the land of "War and Peace," of "Crime and Punishment," of "Fathers and Sons," though we turn out to be not really so much in Russia as in Russian literature. It is a literature seen through Woody Allen's unique prism of the grandiose but hesitant, as if it were being read by a student racked by anxieties about both the afterlife and the common cold. (p. 104)
For such a recklessly funny film, the impression is weirdly serene. The feeling comes not just from the photography and the editing and the stately Prokofieff music but, more fundamentally, from the cast of Woody Allen's mind. He is the only wit alive who could manage with such easy style the skiddy topics of some of the movie's best jokes. Comedians who deal in sexual uncertainty can be dire, like comedians who trade on pretending to be cowards, because both sorts profit by affecting to have qualities that they secretly despise; but Woody Allen makes haplessness about love seem one of the conditions laid down for loving, much as he makes fear of death seem one of the conditions laid down for living. No one who wasn't petrified by mortality could make a comedy that was so palliatively funny about the straits we inhabit. God, if he exists, is described as an underachiever, presumably because of the Deity's failure to put an end to the anguish that comedy tries to see us through…. [Boris' dance with death is a] scene of peculiar carnival respite, like the experience of watching the whole movie. "Love and Death" strikes me as majestically funny: the most shapely piece of cinema that Woody Allen has yet made, and one of comedy's hardiest ripostes to extinction. (p. 109)
Penelope Gilliatt, "The Current Cinema: 'Love and Death'," in The New Yorker (© 1975 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.), Vol. LI, No. 17, June 16, 1975, pp. 104, 107-09.
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