Love and Death

Two years after first directing Diane Keaton for the screen in the sci-fi satire Sleeper—and two years before launching her to superstardom with a tailor-written leading role in Annie Hall—Woody Allen again joined forces with the actress in 1975, casting her as his romantic opposite for Love and Death: an indiscriminately irreverent, inexhaustibly daffy, Chaplin- and Bergman-quoting send-up of 19th-century Russian literature. Keaton plays Sonia, the passionately loquacious cousin, paramour, and eventual wife of Allen’s Boris, a philosophically inclined son of an aristocratic family, whose reputation for cowardice is put to the test when he enlists to fight in the Napoleonic Wars. The New Yorker critic Penelope Gilliatt, reviewing Love and Death upon its release, singled out the “vividly alert” Keaton as “one of the few witty women in public life so far who have managed also to be clowns without feeling unconsciously bound to mock themselves.”