by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Autumn Leaves, a 1956 Columbia release of a Bill Goetz production and a vehicle for
Joan Crawford, who lives in a bungalow by the L.A. beachfront and is 50 years
old (the age of the real Crawford at the time). She makes her living typing would-be
authors’ manuscripts from her home and has never seriously dated — though it
takes a flashback sequence to tell us why: she had a boyfriend named Paul when
her father became deathly ill, and she stopped going on dates with him to stay
home and take care of her dad. We learn this while Crawford’s character,
Millicent “Milly” Wetherby, gets two tickets to the second balcony of a
classical concert from one of her clients who’s been trying to get her to do
dinner with him, and she changes the two “nosebleed” seats (the term is
actually used in the dialogue) for one in the orchestra. The concert turns out
to be a solo piano recital in which the music we hear is Chopin’s
Fantaisie-Impromptu, Op. 66 (we see a highly capable young pianist on screen
but what I suspect we’re hearing is one of José Iturbi’s soundtrack recordings
for Columbia’s Chopin biopic, A Song to Remember), which has the effect on Milly that that madeleine
had on Proust; immediately she and we are at daddy’s bedside, listening to
(more or less) the same piece on an old-style portable phonograph, watching him
warn her that if she keeps blowing off her boyfriend to take care of him she’ll
lose him and be lonely by the time he croaks. She doesn’t heed his advice, and
romance doesn’t rear its head in her life until, grabbing a late-night supper
after the concert, she runs into a young man named Burt Hanson (Cliff
Robertson, who at 19 years younger than Crawford was just the right age for the
role — discernibly younger but not so much younger that it looks like she’s really robbing the cradle), who horns his way first into
the other seat at her table (they’re dining at a nondescript cafeteria with a
jukebox blasting swing, though when Crawford takes over she plays the title
song of the film, the French instrumental by Jacques Kosma originally called by
a title that literally translates as “The Leaves of Death”!), then into her
bungalow (he lets himself in one day when she forgets to lock up when she goes
out, which really dates this
movie) and finally into a hot kissing scene on what looks like the same stretch
of Malibu Beach where the famous tryst between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr
had been filmed for From Here to Eternity three years before. (Director Robert Aldrich even copies Fred
Zinnemann’s famous shot of the tide coming in over the bodies of the
swimsuit-clad lovers as a Production Code-safe metaphor for the afterglow of a
sexual climax.)
Aldrich and his writers, Jack Jevne, Lewis Meltzer and Robert
Blees (according to imdb.com, Jevne was a “front” for the blacklisted couple
Hugo Butler and Jean Rouverol; Blees worked on some of Douglas Sirk’s similarly
sophisticated soap operas for Universal around the same time), are sensitive
enough to drop subtle little hints that all is not well upstairs inside Burt’s
head, even as the reluctant Milly falls hard for him and lets him talk her into
a quickie Mexican marriage (Mexico is represented, hilariously, by the usual
Columbia backlot street sets, only with the signs changed to Spanish). First, he
tells her he was born and raised in Racine, Wisconsin, only later he says he’s
from Chicago. Then he tells her that while he was in the Army during the Korean
War, he was strictly a noncombatant and his unit never got out of Japan — only
when his father (Lorne Greene) and ex-wife Virginia (Vera Miles) come to town,
he starts telling war stories that indicate he was under fire. Milly starts to
investigate Burt’s claim that he’s a section manager at a downtown department
store; she finds that he indeed works there, but only as a tie salesman, and
the presents from the store he’s been lavishing on her, which he said he was
paying for on credit, he’d actually stolen. Thanks to tasteful writing (whoever
the real writers were) and Aldrich’s tense, understated direction — a far cry
from the Grand Guignol atmosphere
of his other movie with Crawford, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (though there, as here, Aldrich managed to get
Crawford to underact — something
almost nobody noticed because Bette Davis’s scenery-chewing performance in the
title role overwhelmed Crawford’s far subtler, more delicate work as her
victim), Autumn Leaves seems
awfully soapy as it begins but gains power and force as it proceeds and we get
the big reveal. It seems that Burt’s father seduced his wife and Burt caught
them in bed together one day — and this freaked him out and led him to a mental
disintegration that just gets worse when he catches daddy and his ex in bed
together again when they come to
town to visit him.
It seems all they’re interested in is getting him to sign
some papers they need to get hold of the share of the family property that
belonged to Burt’s now-dead mom, and to get him to sign they’re threatening to
have him put into a mental institution. (This is a bit of a plot hole because
if someone signed a legal paper when they were in a mental institution, they
would be considered “not of sound mind” and therefore the paper would be
invalid — and it’s not like they’re blackmailing him by threatening him with commitment; they’re saying they’re going to
commit him and then force him to
sign the document.) Milly confronts Virginia and Hanson père outside the bungalow where she and Burt are living
in full-out Joan Crawford style
(all the more startling since she’s been underplaying all movie until then) — “You,
his loving, doting fraud of a father! And you, you SLUT! You’re both so
consumed with evil, so ROTTEN! Your filthy souls are too evil for Hell itself!”
— and then rejoins her husband inside. Alas, he’s so paranoid by this time he
thinks his current wife is making common cause with his past one and his dad,
and he slaps her a couple of times and then takes her typewriter and smashes it
to the floor, injuring her hand — leaving it touch-and-go for a couple of reels
whether she’ll still be able to work. Burt’s already slender hold on sanity
disintegrates so rapidly that it reaches a point where he’s in a fugue state,
hanging around the house doing nothing, and by the time Milly realizes that
everyone she’s talked to (not only the dad and ex-wife who were too evil for
hell itself, but her own doctor as well) is right and Burt does need to be committed to a mental hospital, Burt has literally
regressed to childhood — and given what we know about her now, the sight of
Joan Crawford “babying” an adult male is bizarre on even more levels than the
filmmakers intended. It all ends more or less happily — he goes through his
stint at the institution, she’s there waiting for him when he gets out, and the
two of them look headed for an uncertain future but at least one with a shared
vision of reality — but until then Autumn Leaves is quite a movie, a well-wrought, intense drama
that, despite director Aldrich’s claim that “I didn’t think it would turn out
to be quite as soap-opera-ish as it did. I didn’t have the foresight to see it
then,” actually transcends its origins.
While it’s interesting to imagine what
Douglas Sirk might have made of this story (especially since he would no doubt
have cast Barbara Stanwyck in the female lead), Aldrich does an excellent job,
not that far removed from the kind of sinew Sirk was putting into his big-budget 1950’s soaps at Universal. He had the
usual problems with Crawford and her diva-ish temperament; she brought in her own writer (Aldrich, in his
interview with Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in The Celluloid
Muse, doesn’t say who), and Aldrich
wouldn’t let any changes be made in the script. “Up until the night before
shooting on the film was due to commence, there was a continued harassment
about the possibility of her not showing up,” Aldrich recalled. “I got a call
at two o’clock that very night saying that she wouldn’t be there in the morning
unless her writer could attend, to which I responded that if her writer showed
up we would not shoot. Looking back, I really think that’s the only way you can
properly deal with Miss Crawford. The writer didn’t show up, but she did, and
we proceeded. But she didn’t talk to me for about four or five days. She took
direction, she did what she was supposed to do, but there was no personal
communication. Then one day she was doing a scene terribly effectively — I
don’t remember which one. I was really touched, and when she looked up after
finishing it I tried not to be obvious in wiping away a tear. That broke the
ice, and from then on we were good friends for a long, long time.” Though Autumn
Leaves is a pretty good illustration of
François Truffaut’s comment, when he was still reviewing movies instead of
directing them himself, that Crawford seemed to be looking more masculine in
each film, she’s still quite effective in it, and the film has a genuinely
haunting quality; I’d seen it once before in the 1980’s on a public-domain
videotape and remembered it as good, but this time around it seemed even
better!
