1971@50: A NEW LEAF

Aging playboy Henry Graham, finds himself broke and contrives to marry well and then dispose of his bride and keep living as he has. He meets clumsy and dowdy Henrietta Lowell at a high society tea and recognises his target immediately. Their courtship is brief but effective and soon they are wed and he prepares immediately for the final act. But then things start happening that give him pause. Will a newly developed conscious override his native cold sarcasm and change him? You might be surprised at how this resolves.

In an era of kooky romcoms like Little Murders or Where's Poppa, A New Leaf takes a step further into the realm of the brightly lit end of the street and, looking every inch the '60s meet cute, starts out as a tought, kicking satire with an unexpected heart. This is down to good casting (more later) and the mind of its adapter and director Elaine May. May was known to American audiences for her partnered satirical dialogues on current events on radio and tv. Her partner was Mike Nicholls who also went on to a career in film as a director. The black humour of this early success is threaded all through this fable of conscience as its central antihero is continually tested with opportunities for power or good. That makes it sound like a cardboard pageant but A New Leaf is a constantly engaging  and laugh out loud funny trek through the conflict between intelligence and virtue.

Walter Matthau is far too old to be the playboy that he is. His push through to make us believe that he still considers himself one impresses us and we let him in. His strong and nasty wit make him welcome and, for all its vileness, his scheme to improve himself strikes us as funny and we respond easily to its tension. The brilliant George Rose stands in for Henry's conscience as his man servant, his own bullet-dodging wit delivered and both character and actor are up for the task when Henry's own conscience appears to slowly wake (though as what we won't know until the very end). However, it is Elaine May herself (too beautiful to conceal behind dowdy costuming and klutziness) who carries her creative input to the centre of the screen. Her phsyical humour (the nightgown scene is far more effective that you would imagine at this age: I'm laughing as I type this) plays a committed sense slapstick against her character's unawareness of her clumsiness. The remainder of the cast will be recognisable to anyone who has seen and treasured US comedy cinema from the era with one exception. May roped her old comedy partner Mike Nicholls in for an extraordinary scene as Henry's accountant struggles to convince Henry that the well has run dry while Henry circles back to his demand that one of his cheques be paid.

The story behind the production and release of this infectious comedy is that May attempted to publicly disown it after the studio Paramount cut it down from an intended three hours to just over a hundred minutes. As the original long edit has never been released we can only surmise. I will say that the excesses that made Mikey and Nicky feel like a stretched cover version of a John Cassavettes movie and the (studio-assisted) public ridicule of her later comedy Ishtar might indicate that she's a less is more director, even if that snipping comes from above. It's too hard to say with such a little rap sheet. May is more frequently credited as a writer or script doctor than as a director or actor. I could do with a few more New Leafs but then the longer I've seen comedies stretch their running time the more they fall into dullness. At fifty A New Leaf works and at one hundred and two minutes it seems to work fine. I wonder if we could have this shown to everyone who makes a romcom now to show them the power of stars who are willing to simply clown it over consolidating their brand.