Sonja tells Boris that she yearns for a man who embodies her three essentials of love: intellectuality, spirituality, and sensuality.

Boris completes military training, including a “hygiene play” on condoms and venereal disease.

On furlough, Boris flirts at the opera with the beautiful Countess Alexandrovna, whose current lover has killed several men in duels.

At an inn en route to Moscow, they encounter Don Francisco and his sister, emissaries from Joseph Bonaparte to Napoleon.

Allen shot the film in France and Hungary, where he had to deal with unfavorable weather, spoiled negatives, food poisoning, physical injuries and communication difficulties.

[3] Coming between Allen's Sleeper (1973) and Annie Hall (1977), Love and Death is in many respects an artistic transition between the two.

[3] Allen pays tribute to the humor of The Marx Brothers, Bob Hope and Charlie Chaplin throughout the film.

The dialogue and scenarios parody Russian novels, particularly those by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, such as The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Gambler, The Idiot and War and Peace.

[3] Some of the humor is straightforward; other jokes rely on the viewer's awareness of classic literature or contemporary European cinema.

The site's consensus reads: "Woody Allen plunks his neurotic persona into a Tolstoy pastiche and yields one of his funniest films, brimming with slapstick ingenuity and a literary inquiry into subjects as momentous as Love and Death".

[5] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 89 out of 100, based on 6 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".

[6] Roger Ebert gave it three and a half stars and wrote: "Miss Keaton is very good in Love and Death, perhaps because here she gets to establish and develop a character, instead of just providing a foil, as she's often done in other Allen films ...

"[7] Gene Siskel awarded a full four stars and wrote: "Woody Allen is simply terrific in Love and Death.

He plays to his greatest strength (gag line dialog) and stays away from what has limited his other movies (an attempt to develop a story).

"[8] Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film "Woody Allen's grandest work" and "side-splitting.

"[11] Penelope Gilliatt of The New Yorker thought that Woody Allen and Diane Keaton "have become an unbeatable new team at pacing haywire intellectual backchat.

"[12] Geoff Brown of The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote that "the occasional longueurs and dud jokes never prove fatal to the movie's overall success; to use the description Boris applies to his father, Woody Allen is a 'major loon' and Love and Death provides a fine showcase for his talent.