Love and Death

Love and Death. 1975 United Artists; distributed to DVD by MGM.
Starring: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Jessica Harper, Olga Georges-Picot, James Tolkan, Denise Peron, Harold Gould, Alfred Lutter, Howard Vernon
Director: Woody Allen
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This was the last of Woody Allen's movies where he tried to get as many laughs as possible. Allen offers up parodies of Russian novels by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, pays tribute to several of Ingmar Bergman's films, and adds humor to the proceedings similar to the Marx Brothers (including a parody of a scene from Animal Crackers), Bob Hope, and Charlie Chaplin.

Oh, and in a rare move for Allen, this movie was neither shot, nor filmed anywhere near New York City.

In the film, Napoleon and his lovable rapscallions from France are advancing, and an invasion of the Russian Empire is imminent. Boris Grushenko (Allen) is a coward and a pacifict scholar forced to enlist in the Russian army. On top of that, he just received word that his cousin Sonja (Keaton) is going to marry a herring merchant, Boris accidentally captures a group of French soldiers, but it's all for naught, as the rest of Napoleon's forces reach Moscow immediately after that.

Boris goes home and marries the recently-widowed Sonja, who really doesn't want to marry him, but promises him she will when it looks like he's about to be killed during a duel. Their marriage is filled with philosophical debates, but no money. Sonja is angry that the French invasion will interfere with plans to start a family that year, so she draws up plans to kill Napoleon at his quarters, with Boris reluctantly going along with them after discussing it. Sonja escapes arrest, but Boris isn't so lucky.

Highly recommended movie.