Retrospective: A New Leaf (Patreon)

I can't recall if I've written this somewhere, but a friend's mother once told me that she knows many attorneys who are also romance novelists. She attributed this to a romantic story being an argument for why two people should be together. By the same token, screwball comedies are vociferous arguments for why two catastrophically incompatible people belong together. The result is more or less an excuse to have one scene of absurd bullshit after another, culminating in the highly improbable union between (often but not always) an effete and vaguely inept intellectual and a conniving and eccentrically competent woman.

The screwball comedy makes a glorious return in the New Hollywood era, when filmmakers a little more interested in deconstructing the genre's gender politics. Peter Bogdanovich's masterpiece What's Up Doc is a classic of the form, pairing Ryan O'Neal as the bumbling intellectual with Barbra Streisand as an atypically even-more-scholarly fruitcake. The other classic screwball comedy of the era is Elaine May's first outing as director, A New Leaf, starring the director and Walter Matthau. A New Leaf is a radical departure from other screwball comedies in that one of its protagonists is actively trying to kill the other. Matthau, a profligate trust fund brat who spends all his funds, plots to marry and kill May, an antisocial heiress and botanist, in order to secure her fortune. It's the perfect culmination of the genre: the man is the schemer and it is not working for him.

The movie is extraordinarily. One standout scene comes early on when Matthau utterly fails to comprehend the words "you have no money" coming from his banker. May is one of the physical comedy icons of her era, seemingly incapable of sitting down without being hilarious. And yet the movie is tender, clever and insightful. After a while, Matthau is performing the traditional assigned female role of their relationship, taking care of the household while May lives her career. But this isn't enough for her: she wants to see him flourish, and encourages him to land his own career. It's cute, funny, democratic, and thoroughly surprising. One of the overlooked classics of the Seventies.