Customer Reviews

Autumn Leaves

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This unheralded film is a gem. Joan Crawford plays a single, middle aged woman, named Millicent "Millie" Wetherby, who lives a sterile, lonely life. She is self-employed as a typist and works out of her home. The only people she seems to see are her clients and her landlady (Ruth Donnelly). Hers is a solitary existence. One day, she meets a younger man, Burt Hanson (Cliff Robertson), who despite their age difference manages to sweep her off her feet. Despite her concerns about this May/December romance, she falls in love with the irrepressible Burt. After some persuading, she agrees to marry him. Her happiness is palpable.

Once the honeymoon is over, however, her nightmare begins, as she discovers that the man she loves seems to be someone other than the man whom she married. Burt had apparently been married before and had unexpectedly come upon his wife (Vera Miles) and his father (Lorne Green) in a compromising position together. This had the effect of putting Burt into some sort of fugue state. The net result was that it caused Burt to become mentally unbalanced. How Millie handles this and what happens to her and Burt make for as engrossing film.

This is a wonderful, poignant melodrama that sees Ms. Crawford give a sensational performance as the vulnerable, yet strong, Millie, who confronts the demons in Burt's closet and, ultimately, makes them go away. A very young and boyish Cliff Robertson gives a suitably engaging performance as the hapless Burt. Ruth Donnelly is terrific as Millie's landlady. It was especially nice to see Ms. Donnelly in this film, as she had been in a number of Ms. Crawford's early films. Lorne Green and Vera Miles round off the strong supporting cast. The soundtrack is wonderful, as the title song of the movie is sung by musical great, Nat "King" Cole. It truly is a beautiful song and a fitting one for this excellent film.

This unheralded film is a gem. Joan Crawford plays a single, middle aged woman, named Millicent "Millie" Wetherby, who lives a sterile, lonely life. She is self-employed as a typist and works out of her home. The only people she seems to see are her clients and her landlady (Ruth Donnelly). Hers is a solitary existence. One day, she meets a younger man, Burt Hanson (Cliff Robertson), who despite their age difference manages to sweep her off her feet. Despite her concerns about this May/December romance, she falls in love with the irrepressible Burt. After some persuading, she agrees to marry him. Her happiness is palpable.

Once the honeymoon is over, however, her nightmare begins, as she discovers that the man she loves seems to be someone other than the man whom she married. Burt had apparently been married before and had unexpectedly come upon his wife (Vera Miles) and his father (Lorne Green) in a compromising position together. This had the effect of putting Burt into some sort of fugue state. The net result was that it caused Burt to become mentally unbalanced. How Millie handles this and what happens to her and Burt make for as engrossing film.

This is a wonderful, poignant melodrama that sees Ms. Crawford give a sensational performance as the vulnerable, yet strong, Millie, who confronts the demons in Burt's closet and, ultimately, makes them go away. A very young and boyish Cliff Robertson gives a suitably engaging performance as the hapless Burt. Ruth Donnelly is terrific as Millie's landlady. It was especially nice to see Ms. Donnelly in this film, as she had been in a number of Ms. Crawford's early films. Lorne Green and Vera Miles round off the strong supporting cast. The soundtrack is wonderful, as the title song of the movie is sung by musical great, Nat "King" Cole. It truly is a beautiful song and a fitting one for this excellent film.

"Autumn Leaves" has always been a personal favourite of mine. Being a fan of any stage in Joan Crawford's career I find her in "Autumn Leaves" to be both a powerful performer but also able to display a rather touching vulnerability in her performance as Millicent Wetherby a single early middle aged woman who is alone in the world and feels that that is the way it will always be.

By this time in her career Joan Crawford's great days as a top flight star at MGM and then Warner Bros. were passed but in early 1955 Joan signed a 3 picture deal with Columbia pictures for a considerable sum of money and proved once again that she was expert at reinventing herself as a more mature performer in roles that further explored areas of her formidable character. The 3 films she starred in were "Queen Bee" 1955, "Autumn Leaves" 1956, and "The Story of Esther Costello" 1958. All were very different but all reaped good profits and kept Joan in "A" pictures till the end of the decade. "Autumn Leaves" directed by Robert Aldrich, who Joan would work with again in 1962 on the memorable "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" with Bette Davis, is I feel the best of the three and gives Joan an opportunity to work with a sympathetic character at a time when her roles where getting more and more domineering in character.

Joan's character of Millicent (Millie) is a typist who is very efficient in her work but finds her personal life is non existent. She lives in a row of apartments which are run by her friend and landlady liz (Ruth Donnelly) who is in the same predicament with no man in her life. Millie by chance meets and falls in love, and marries a much younger man Burt Hanson (Cliff Robertson)only to find her new found love turn to horror when it is revealed he suffers from a mental health condition. She also has to deal with Burt's former wife and his conniving father, Vera Miles and Lorne Greene respectively, who are involved with each other, have caused the grief that Burt has gone through, and want Burt out of the way.

"Autmun Leaves" is a dramatic and stirring story and is an early attempt to put a more realistic light on the tragedy of mental illness and the effects it causes. I feel this issue is handled in a mature and non judgemetal manner in the film and makes for a most engrossing story. Joan Crawford gives the role of Millie her all and she is just right in her early scenes as the lonely single lady just wanting some love in her life. Her later acting in the scenes where Burt's condition and family history becomes apparent to her is superlative. Her interactions with the characters played by Vera Miles and Lorne Greene are extremely powerful and it is interesting to see Lorne Greene in an early role just before he found everlasting stardom on "Bonanza". It's Joan however who keeps your attention and her development in the story from a victim through to some one who is capable of deciding her own future is excellent. It is by far her best performance in her later years.

I strongly recommend "Autumn Leaves" to you if you appreciate a good mature story, strong acting and a production with a good heart to it. Joan Crawford fans will undoubtedly enjoy her work here. Her chemistry with the much younger Cliff Robertson is wonderful and reveals Joan's courage in taking on this quite difficult role at a time when film offers were not so numerous. Enjoy!!

This is a wonderful film about middle aged love. The casting features Cliff Robertson as the object of devotion as well as Vera Miles and many more. Nat King Cole provides the theme song which is a really nice touch. This was directed by Bob Aldrich who also directed "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" featuring Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. The VHS (video) version of this film is extremely difficult to get. ...

I loved this movie when I saw it as a child and never forgot Joan Crawford in this fabulous performance. I wanted so much to see it again and did find it in Amazon.com at an incredible price. She shines in this role with great class, elegance, grace, sensitivity, love and strength. So expressive are her lovely eyes and fine figure. She is truly a super star in this role ~ A class act all the way ~ wonderful. You will want to play it again and again ~ sheer brilliance!! Joan Crawford will never be forgotten in the perfection she exhibited in this riveting role.

Yes, SHE knew her craft - and knew it well!

JOAN CRAWFORD! Always a Star, always an inspiration, who do we have today who can walk into a Studio facility and instantly know what would or would not work - Costume, make-up [created for her], script [the required "telephone scene", etc.]? The unmistakable voice - never quite duplicated.

It wasn't just about the glitz, it took hard work to get there. [She was also directed by Spielberg!]

This is a seldom seen, but great story about misapplied middle-aged love. Quite a few casting surprises too - Cliff Robertson as the love object, Vera Miles [pre-Psycho] and more! Great theme song - Nat King Cole, perfect for anytime!

Director Bob Aldrich went on to do "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" with her [and who was that "other" star?]

This VHS version is quite good, but Fans deserve a DVD Crawford set!

Robert Aldrich drags (pun intended) the 1940s 'woman's picture' and Freudian melodrama violently screaming into the blandly conformist 1950s, creating a demented leftist classic. We are so used these days to seeing balding old actors having their egos massaged by nubile young actresses, it's nice to see a Hollywood film that turns the tables for a change, even if the double-standard decrees that the woman's 'punishment' for such taboo transgression is Oedipal crises, insanity, conspiracies and domestic brutality.

Joan Crawford is in her self-sacrificing, suffering element as a middle-aged spinster, whose professional and financial independence, unheard of in the family-values/woman=housewife 50s (and provocatively located in the home, from where, way ahead of her time, she works as a for-hire, boss-less typist), is matched by a barren emotional life. On a rare, disppointing, outing, she meets (or, more accurately, has thrust upon her) a pushy, talkative young man, with whom she begins, after hesitation over feared social disapproval, a life-saving romance. to the audience, the young man's nervy volubility and suspicious actions simply suggest a conman picking up a lonely vulnerable woman, but there soon unravels darker secrets, much more fundamental to the aggressively self-confident, delusive America of the era.

it would spoil the delirious development of the narrative to reveal any more: suffice it to say the sacred cow of the family is slaughtered, in particular paternal authority, revealed as phoney, malevolent and perverse, actually trying to reverse the process of social order (as adapted from Freud's Oedipal theory), rather than unpholding it. The 1940s psychoanalytic film tended to limit itself to individual trauma, or, at most, suggest the healing possibilities for war-derived trauma. Aldrich's variant applies the psychic repressions of individuals to the political, social and cultural repressions of a nation, showing how their only outlet is in violence. the transgressor can only by brought back into the fold by brainwashing (euphemised by the bland jargon of experts), as shown in a horrifying montage anticipating 'A Clockwork Orange'.

this violence is embodied in Aldrich's film form, with its wild lurches in tone and genre, the disorientation of editing and composition, the increasing hysteria of the acting and the neurotic shocks of the very imaginative soundtrack, both music and sounds.

Aldrich's plot bears some similarity to THE great 50s melodrama, Douglas Sirk's 'All That Heaven allows', and he shares with the German an interest in using the popular weepie as a vehicle for locating crises in the family and society. His visual style is also similar - the use of frames within the screen (doorways, windows, mirrors etc.) to create proscenium arches, suggesting the falseness, the theatricality of a society based on social and gender performances, rather than true feeling. Aldrich's style is more heavy-handed than the graceful Sirk's, stridently imposing his points, but he achieves some remarkable effects, such as an early flashback where a concert audience blacks out a haloed Crawford, as she remembers in headless flashback the family scene that determined her solitary future. His ability to make restrictive interiors suddently seem vast and alienating, is also striking.

Crawford, her grimly clenched, over-lipsticked mouth mummified in an androgynous, Edith Piaf-like death mask, is fantastic.

Being an ardent fan of Joan Crawford I have watched nearly all the films she has starred in either through VHS, DVD, or television airings. I have come to the conclusion the 1950's were by far the decade that showcased Crawford in some of her best work, although many would argue her best films roles were in the 1930's and '40's. I guess I enjoy watching Joan in this phase of her life where she is still "the star" as she would often play older women in love with younger men, men who were often at times dangerous and who would place Crawford's characters in situations of peril. Nowhere is this more evident than in 1956's "Autumn Leaves". Regarded by Joan as one of her favorites, "Autumn Leaves" stars Joan as a woman who falls for a much younger man, played superbly by Cliff Robertson. His character is mentally unbalanced who eventually abuses the Crawford character both mentally and physically. In time Millicent (Joan's character) discovers the key as to why her new-found boyfriend is disturbed. Both Vera Miles and Lorne Green are superb in this and this would be Robert Aldrich's first film in which he directed Crawford, the second being 1962's "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?".

Joan has also gone on record as saying she helped coach Robertson when it came time to do his mad scenes as she starred in a similar role in 1947's "Possessed" where she played an unbalanced nurse who shoots her lover cold.

Unfortunately, "Autumn Leaves" has never received a DVD or Blue Ray release here in North America despite having a cult following. It has, however, recieved a DVD release in Spain for Region 2 players. "Harriet Craig" (1950) and "Berserk!" (1968) have also been released for Region 2. So, Columbia since these movies have been restored to DVD qlarity for foreign countries why not release them to the North American marketplace?

Autumn Leaves is really an extraorinary film - yet pretty much unknown to the public. This is Crawford just before the beginning of the end - she's developed the caricatured look, but has not yet descended into the campy acting. Cliff Robertson gives an admirable turn as a mentally ill December groom.

One word of warning - don't watch this if you're a female turning thirty, with no husband or significant other. Otherwise, you'll quckly find yourself in a Spinsterville funk!

This movie is always a joy for me to watch. Joan Crawford gives an outstanding performance as a woman who gets married to a man, and finds out that he has some creepy secrets that he never told her! For example, he was married before and that he was a compulsive liar! When he sees his father in bed with his ex-wife, he goes completely insane and whacks Joan with a typewriter! It's fascinating to see both these actors incredible talents make this film so melodramatic, effective, and eventually sad and heart-warming. Very, very well done and beautiful music.