The Literary Side of "Love and Death"


“I recall my first mystical vision. I was walking through the woods thinking about Christ. If he was a carpenter I wondered what he charged for bookshelves.” – Boris

From Woody Allen’s 1975 film Love and Death; Allen’s hysterical cinematic parody of Russian literature.

Other literary tidbits from the film include:

-“This is crazy I can’t shoot a gun I was meant to write poetry” – Boris

-there is a scene between Boris and his father where the entire dialogue between consists of allusions or direct references to Dostoevsky titles.

-at one point during his brief stint as a poet Boris says while reading from a poem “I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas” which is taken verbatim from T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Boris goes on to comment about the work calling it “Too sentimental,” and then throws the poem away.

The trailer:

The film is as funny now, maybe even funnier, then it was 30 years ago. An absolute classic.

Love and Death at Imdb
at Wikipedia

If your a Netflix subscriber with a Roku box you can watch it instantly here