Thanks to Be Kind Rewind, I watched Elaine May’s A New Leaf in March 2021 on Criterion, and really liked it a lot. It’s a darkly humored romantic comedy from 1971 in which Walter Matthau plays a recently bankrupt egotist who decides to marry and murder a woman for her money, and Elaine May, who wrote and directed the film, plays an awkward botanist who is also an heiress. It’s a funny courtship in which he thinks she’s odd and peculiar, but trying to romance her, and she’s kind of in her own world of plants but agrees to marry him, and he’s trying to plot the best way to murder her while she’s oblivious to his real intentions, and he is slowly falling for her good heart and hesitating on his plans. It sounds weird, but it is played off in a funny and charming way of two square dorks played by comedic legends against each other. I really adored this, and as I don’t know a lot about Elaine May apart from her collaborations with Mike Nichols, this was a great introduction. She’s great at playing clumsy and awkward, and I could imagine that Diane Keaton took some influence from her in her screen persona from this role, more so the cute and eccentric part with big glasses and hats.
As explained in the video link (the A New Leaf part starts at 8:15), the studio cut is not what May had intended, fighting the studio to release her version of the film, with a different ending and other scenes. So it’s not entirely her vision, but I still think it’s a gem.
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