Did You Know?
The wheat scene with towards the end of the film is a direct visual parody of Ingmar Bergman's classic Persona. The juxtaposition of faces is an homage to Bergman's trademark shots.
Share this
The soundtrack was originally scored with the music of Igor Stravinsky, but Woody Allen thought it made the scenes "unfunny". He discovered Sergei Prokofiev's lighthearted music worked far better.
Share this
The shots of the lion statues edited into the love scene between Boris and the Countess, and the shot of the soldier being shot in the eye through his glasses are parodies of similar statues in Battleship Potemkin, shown during the Odessa Steps massacre scene.
Share this
When Woody Allen leaves for the army, he is shown carrying preserved butterflies and a butterfly net as homage to Russian-born author Vladimir Nabokov.
Share this
Filmed mainly in Hungary, with some scenes done in Paris. It wouldn't be until 1996 and Everyone Says I Love You that Woody Allen would make another film outside of the New York area.
Share this
The philosophical "babble" between the characters (e.g. "subjectivity is objective") actually comes from the writing of Russian philosophers G.I. Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky, as does the title "Love and Death".
Share this
Boris is in his cottage writing poetry. He reads, "I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas." He then promptly balls up the writing and throws it into the fire, calling it "too sentimental". The line is from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of 'J.Alfred Prufrock'".
Share this
When Boris' father visits him in his prison cell, near the end of the movie, he tells him about Raskolnikov killing two women and about getting told by the brothers Karamazov. Rodion Raskolnikov is the protagonist in Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic "Crime and Punishment", in which he murders two women and does not know how to deal with the moral consequences afterwards. "The Brothers Karamazov" is another epic book by the same Russian writer. The dialogue also evokes "The Possessed", "Raw Youth", "The Idiot", "The Insulted and Injured" (usually "The Insulted and Humiliated"), "The Gambler", "The Double", "Bobok", all of them novels by Dostoyevsky.
Share this
Woody Allen was so concerned about the quality of Budapest's food that he consumed only canned food and bottled water that he had brought with him from America. As a result, Allen was one of the few of his movie's cast and crew who did not suffer dysentery while filming.
Share this
