Rent Love and Death (1975)

Literary Comedy. - Love and Death review by Steve

This is the film Woody Allen released after Sleeper, so arguably it is a slight backward step, being episodic and a little erratic. But it's still funny and entertaining, and benefits from superior photography and music borrowed from Sergei Prokofiev. This is the last of Woody's early funny ones.

It is a satire inspired by the giants of Russian literature, particularly Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov, but visually this is very much a comic tribute to Ingmar Bergman (which Allen makes explicit at the end when he melts a face and a profile into one image in homage to Persona.

Woody style is to parody intellectualism and then puncture its pretentiousness with a low joke. There are long discussions about philosophy and the absurdity of Being in an indifferent cosmos: 'All men go eventually, but I go six o'clock tomorrow morning. I was supposed to go at five o'clock but I have a smart lawyer.

Woody and Diane Keaton suffer famine and existential trauma, fight a duel and plot to assassinate Napoleon. It's a series of sketches which deliver a blizzard of gags, and some hit and some don't, but the stars make it fun. Woody's schtick in his early films often drew on Bob Hope. Never more than this one.