She had quite the range. Keaton played the very serious Kay Corleone in The Godfather in 1972 and starred in the slapstick Woody Allen film Sleeper in 1973.
It absolutely is – possibly one of Allen’s best and most creative!
The legal name of the actor Stewart Granger was James Stewart but he couldn’t use it because another famous actor had it.
It’s his funniest film, hands down. Other films he made in the 1970s may be more intelligent and profound, but none of them have as many laughs per minute as L&D. Great use of Prokofiev, too.
Here’s my favorite scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qwvX4B3gis &25
I love the pseudo-intellectual fake philosophical discussions between Allen and Diane Keaton as his cousin Sonja, reflecting classic Russian writers’ dreary obsession with life and death and the meaning of it all. The Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock, in his book Nonsense Novels, parodied a wide variety of writing styles and genres, including this classic Russian one, where the world is perpetually dreary and filled with secrets and mysteries and no one knows anything.