A New Leaf

The good: Walther Matthau is who he is, a charming AND obnoxious fellow, with a loud mouth, with lots of mischievous behaviour. He is always fun to watch, BUT... The bad: unfortunately this movie is simply lacking (big time) in good jokes. It is also lacking in a good "sparring partner" to launch the jokes of Walter Matthay, like Jack Lemmon often ideally was... This movie is simply going nowhere. It's boring, tedious, terribly dated. Only braindead elderly would rate this with anything higher than a 7. Really weird that there are so many 9 or 10 star reviews for this movie. I guess only people who loved this movie and even knew it existed wrote a review, because I cant imagine anyone wanting to artificially fix the Imdb score for this movie, which nobody (in their right mind) will ever remember...

source: A New Leaf

source: A New Leaf

I have caught this on TCM more then once and while browsing through exotic car ads thought about it again. If you are in the middle class like me, and have rubbed elbows with the truly upper class (like me, grew up in Manhattan, I looked up an apartment I grew up in poor, it's selling for $3 million dollars now, I was surrounded by stinking rich people growing up and I was middle class poor) you will especially like this film. The reason why it's so funny? IT'S TRUE! Isn't that the best comedy? I mean yes the rich are portrayed in many comedies but for whatever reason, this one nails them. All of them, because like the poor there are many different personalities. It is also hilarious with it's depiction of the middle class so yes it's funny all around. There are lines in this movie that I vividly remember but my all time favorite, the all time gut buster that I attach to my own life when I lose a bundle of money in stocks? The part where Matthau talks to his accountant and realizes he has spent everything and he is walking in the streets aimlessly talking to himself "I'm poor" oh my god, that is just one of the most hilarious movie scenes ever. You have got to see this film if you know how the sheltered rich are, it is hilarious. 10 of 10.

Isn't it sad that after 40 years this film got only 45 reviews? That means one review per year... Sometimes it's very difficult to accept that the general taste of the masses disregards excellent films like this one in favor of awful productions. Why, we are tired of counting into the hundreds the countless reviews about silly (or worse) movies not even worthy of the effort that it takes to write a review. Today I saw "A New Leaf" again after many years, and to my surprise, I enjoyed it even more (is that possible?) than the first time around. It has lost nothing of its excellent humor (Black Humor) and everybody is terrific, even the smallest and briefest of all the characters (and characters they are...: The Cleanning Lady, somebody to take home with you, Henrietta (Elaine May) a classic and unclassifiable character so warm, so humane, so grandiose in her absentmindedness. On the other hand nobody will think that taking Henry (Walter Matthau) or his rich uncle home could be a good idea (Uncle Harry --James Coco-- what a sublime actor!). In Henry's case the turnabout of this character is very well portrayed and shows us that nobody is true black or white, but merely a shade of the so many gradations of gray. The direction is perfect and some of the scenes belong in an anthology of their own; a scene --among most of them, all so good-- that I found almost out of a "Monty Python" movie is the one when Harry is riding a horse in the country and a messenger comes at full gallop to deliver a message and while he delivers it, his horse slowly starts to fall down, like dying or something (an asthma attack maybe?) and ends up full length on the ground, after an exhausted final neigh while the man dismounts it and finishes his message standing while watching his horse in stupor. Superb humor. One of my most endearing films, maybe helped by the fact that Elaine May is one of my favorite personalities ever and, as Henrietta, her character in this movie, was --classic and unclassifiable-- one of a kind.

Along with Chaplin's "Gold Rush", Keaton's "The General", and Woody Allen's "Manhattan cycle: Annie Hall/Broadway Danny Rose, Manhattan, etc.", Elaine May's "A New Leaf is one of the greatest comedies of the 20th century, and the only one that has not been released on Laser or DVD formats. Hopefully someone like Criterion will get to restore it to Ms. May's original cut.

A NEW LEAF is one of the funniest movies ever made. Walter Matthau is priceless as an infantile party boy who loses his fortune and must marry within a month before his sadistic uncle will bail him out. Elaine May, who wrote and directed, is a frumpy but very wealthy botanist who becomes Matthau's unlucky prey. A klutz who knows nothing but plants, May is terrific, but the movie belongs to Matthau. He is a snob of the highest order who makes no bones about looking down on everyone else. As his astute butler tells him, he's managed to keep alive traditions that died long before he was even born. When Matthau berates a society matron for being overly obsessed with her carpeting it's side-splitting. A NEW LEAF is full of hysterical scenes. BEWARE: Several scenes are eliminated from Paramount Picture's butchered version. Find the Director's cut!

... as I remember seeing it on TV in the 1970's when I was still in high school. In every way imaginable I saw myself as Henrietta -awkward, shy, clumsy, dismissed by everyone. Forty years later I still recognize that awkward person Elaine May is portraying. Yet Henrietta seems completely clueless that she is perceived this way, which was something I found hard to buy, but it does make her more endearing and make this film more about Henry's journey as he marries this totally helpless yet wealthy creature in order to get out from under his financial problems and discovers he has to take over every aspect of her life outside of her profession as botanist in order to preserve her wealth and his rarefied sense of order. You might say Henry dislikes his new wife so much because he initially sees himself as her - he says so at the beginning of the film when he finds out he has no money. He confides in his gentleman's gentleman that he has no talents or ambitions other than being rich. This is not the case, but this is how he sees himself. This really IS the case for Henrietta yet she does not see herself that way. So, in a really quirky way they are made for each other. How did Henry know that he would be the beneficiary of Henrietta's estate if he should manage to either kill her or arrange "an accident" and get away with it? Someone with so much money and so many hangers-on as Henrietta would almost certainly have a will prior to their meeting. A set-up by Henrietta's crooked lawyer (also only interested in her money) and Henry's uncle (Henry is on the hook for a loan from him that will mean the forfeiture of all of his assets should he fail) made to make Henry look like the fortune hunter he is backfires and Henrietta changes her will and leaves everything to Henry, with the entire sad tail of Henry's poverty just endearing him even more to her! Elaine May has always been an underrated talent, and as for Walter Matthau, what can I say? In 1968 he makes "The Odd Couple" and has me believing he's a the world's biggest working class slob, oblivious to his financial condition as long as poker night happens, and three years later he's got me believing he's the world's biggest snob interested only in savoring the finer things in life and dedicated "to traditions that were dead before you were born" - to put it in the words of Henry's (Matthau's) gentleman's gentleman. If you have a chance, give it a look. It is full of subtle dry humor executed to perfection by the cast. Only after the cynical 70's began could such a film be made. Maybe if it had been made after Watergate the public would have been cynical enough to appreciate it at the box office.

This was a "fair" comedy, a story about a man who was a rich guy but lost all his money. He wants to go back to rich again so he marries this nerdy rich woman. Wow, what a man of principal! Walter Matthau was a good choice to play that role. He usually came across as kind of rogue, no matter role he played. Here, he is "Henry Graham" and Elaine May plays the female lead, "Henrietta Lowell." As opposed to Matthau's hit-you-over-the-head kind of humor, I liked May's dry sense of wit. The humor is very secular, by the way. I think that characterizes this comedy: mildly funny, but consistently so. What shocked me was that this movie was rated "G" and had a number of swear words in it, such as "S.O.B." How can that be?

There is a category of films that includes several movies made by serious artists which emerged in a final form much different from that originally conceived. This group includes Erich Von Stroheim's silent masterpiece "Greed"------originally made as a movie that ran for over nine hours!; John Huston's filming of Stephen Crane's "Red Badge of Courage"-----finally presented to us by M-G-M in a badly mutilated 69 minute fragment of its original form; Orson Welles' conception of Booth Tarkington's "Magnificent Ambersons"---taken away from him by RKO bureaucrats who then edited it down to a truncated 88 minutes; and Frank Capra's "Lost Horizon"---originally released at 130 minutes in length and then chopped down to 109 minutes in subsequent re-releases. We will never know what these works would have ended up looking like. Even in a recent attempt to "restore" "Greed" to something approximating its original form, the missing links are supplied through available studio "still" photos. Such travesties have been going on for years. Judy Garland's much admired version of "A Star Is Born" can now be seen only in a "restored" version that follows a fate somewhat similar to that of "Greed." The same is true of "Lost Horizon." Nonetheless, we should be grateful that a portion of these films did survive, to give us the pleasure of seeing something very special---even if only in a limited sense, This takes us to "A New Leaf." As most film goers know, Elaine May wrote a significantly different (and much darker) screenplay than the movie we now see on the screen. But to her credit, the film she made had so many elements of true greatness in it that the studio edited version now available is very enjoyable on its own terms. It is one of the most underrated comedies of the 1970's and surely one of the funniest and most inspired. The ensemble of actors May gathered created some superb comic characters---and have never done any better work in comedy. May and Walter Matthau's chemistry in the leading roles worked exceptionally well. William Redfield (who died much too young) is wonderful in a carefully understated role. And singled out for special recognition is George Rose as Matthau's long-suffering valet---a nuanced presentation by a very gifted actor. Matthau's romance of May is sweet, touching, at times somewhat edgy and always engaging. The growth of their relationship from an almost bloodless union of convenience to the quite tender match up at the end is but one example of the high level of May's comedic writing and the very capable acting of May and Matthau. Too bad that they never had the opportunity to appear together again. "A New Leaf" deserves both a wider audience, and repeated viewings to appreciate just what a great film it really is. As others have noted, it also demands a good DVD presentation for that whole new generation of lovers of fine comedy who have never seen it before. Can anyone watch Renee Taylor in her one great scene with Matthau uttering the line "Don't let them out!" possibly ever forget this movie? Finally---a personal appeal to Elaine May. Some day (soon we hope), "A New Leaf" will be released to DVD in an edition worthy of the film so many people have come to admire. You will no doubt be asked to supply the DVD with an audio commentary on the film. It is essential----really critical----that your views on the making of this film be preserved for present and future generations. Almost 40 years have passed since its original release. Tell us your story!