"Love and Death" is a curious olio of nightclub patter, revue sketches and one-liners, most of them quite funny but uneasily stitched together. What comes out resembles a movie only as something midway between a crazy quilt and a potato sack resembles a suit of clothes. Now, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that: like anything else, film can accommodate a great many forms or lacks of form of a madcap, one-shot, sui generis kind. But there is a grave problem with "Love and Death," hilarious as much of it may be. This sort of film wears thin too easily, laughter that is largely pointless becomes in the end exhausting. This does not necessarily happen within a single Woody Allen film, which, kept wisely short, can generally squeeze by without our realizing until later that we have been exercising our jaws in a vacuum—that we could have gotten roughly the same effect from laughing gas, sneezing powder or a mutual tickling session with a friendly prankster. (pp. 1, 15)

[For] the more discriminating viewer a certain, as it were, postcoital depression sets in even earlier: say, midway through the film. It is in the nature of gags not to be all as funny as the best of the lot: a set of perfectly matched jokes is infinitely harder to come by than a necklace of perfectly matched pearls…. What put "Sleeper" above Allen's other films so far is that it really was about something besides gags—about what was wrong with present-day society revealed in terms of a grimly caricatured but all too plausible future.

In "Love and Death," however, the joke is everything; if it misfires, we promptly begin to wonder what it is that we have been laughing at, anyway. The film starts out as a vague satire on Russian novels (do we need that?), but soon scatters toward all kinds of targets, from anti-Semitism to Jewish sexuality…. "Love and Death," says the title, and we think that the film may work its way up to some comic insights into these two big subjects or, better yet, about how they interrelate. Yet while it boasts gags galore about both, it has nothing much to say about either, let alone about the two of them together….

This is particularly saddening because Woody Allen is more than merely funny: at his best, he exhibits a penetrating intelligence—indeed, intellect—well beyond the mental means of our run-of-the-mill farceurs. Such intelligence can uncover, ridicule, and perhaps help laugh out of existence genuine evils, and a little, a very little, of this elixir survives even in the anomic laugh-fest of "Love and Death." But the movie stoops far too often to such things as a facile sight gag about a convention of village idiots which, when you come right down to it, yields laughter that leaves you with a bad taste in the soul. (p. 15)