Fifty-five years after its release, “A New Leaf” still stands alone. Its director, the multihyphenate Elaine May, brought her experience as a Street actress and progressive comedian to her filmmaking style, which would be have been noticed to be clever in the singular if May was born a man. Instead, his insistence on tight writing and loose, improvisational playing earned him a reputation for being “difficult.”
Elaine May’s original script isn’t the first film about a couple plotting to kill each other: The concept runs through Preston Sturges’ “Unfaithfully Yours” (1948), and 1965’s “How to Murder Your Wife.” Still, May’s unique voice and style give “A New Leaf” an unparalleled sensitivity and depth, sneaking into the film unnoticed while the audience is busy laughing at the characters and their screwball antics. As the critic Richard Brody wrote in 2024, “the core of May’s work is the horror of romantic relationships as women experience them” – a theme that is treated here first as farce, then as something difficult to explain.
Henry Graham (Walter Matthau) is the protagonist of the film, a heartless Manhattan gambler and money is an elusive concept. It never occurred to him that he might run out of money, he just got confused by his lawyer explaining that his trust fund has run out. Selling his art collection—which, let’s be honest, includes stunning modern pieces that could be worth millions by 2026—is out of the question. So, in a murderous twist on the “gold digger” stereotype, he plans to find a rich single woman to marry, and then kill, to preserve his lifestyle. (Staying he is married to his unlucky bride, no question.)
Henry can be a bad guy, but May refuses to take him too seriously. A deadpan montage at the beginning of the film shows a shallow Henry absent-mindedly saying goodbye to the configuration of his wealth, while his beloved Ferrari, which breaks down every time he drives it, symbolizes the futility of his existence. It’s as if he enlightens Harry so carefully, in fact, that it’s surprising when he’s so good at something without telling a stitch in French.
Henry has a great bull detector, as it turns out. The audience knows that he is only helping his new wife, Henrietta (May), with his finances to increase his posthumous return, but he does not. He thinks he is protecting her. The tension between what the audience knows and what the characters know is one of the film’s less extreme jokes: “You can believe me that this idiot thinks we’ve finally found someone we love because of it?” He seemed to say. “You’re actually trying to kill him!”
It’s interesting to read that May pretends to be the naive Henrietta, a woman who is invisible because everyone is focused on the crumbs on the front of her dress. (She’s modeled after Tina Fey on “30 Rock,” down to the glasses.) May is notoriously reluctant to discuss her personal life—she refused to cooperate with the 2024 biography “Miss May Did Not Exist,” for example—which means this speculation will have to remain. However, Henrietta’s naiveté has a note of tragedy to it that feels vulnerable, even personal, to the director.
Henrietta’s misunderstanding and lack of refinement are both played for laughs in “A New Leaf.” Although he primarily lives with words, May shows a remarkable fitness for physicality in the role. Besides being funny, even the weird way he holds his hands when he sits—May dangles his appendages in front of him, as if his wrists are broken—tells us a lot about his personality. Henrietta is self-centered and uncomfortable with her body, and only relaxes when she talks about her favorite subject: ferns.
This is where the “New Leaf” begins to mature into something very different. Initially cast as predator and prey, both Henry and Henrietta prove to be far more complex than their comically exaggerated personas suggest. Henrietta doesn’t care about material things, but she doesn’t care about them completely, either: Her dream of having a new plant named after her is fueled by her desire for scientific immortality. Henry is associated with an ego that is less than this need, and briefly softens his mark/bride. Another dark joke from May: A man only sees a woman as a person when she acts like one.
But what really changes their dynamic is when the sweet, sly Henrietta names the fern she found on their honeymoon after her much younger husband. (He didn’t notice at the time; he was too busy reading a “Beginner’s Guide to Toxicology.”) Appropriately flattered, Henry begins to wonder if having a wife—specifically this wife—might not be so bad after all. He’s not a bad husband, either, if you can get past the whole “murderous intent” thing. The dark comedy can be summed up in one image: At its core, “New Leaf” is a woman who says, “Yes, you tried to kill me, but other than that you’re a good man.”
Based on the story “Green Heart” by Jack Ritchie, May’s script for “A New Leaf” is full of catchphrases and silly bon mots. (“Sooty blot” is great, as is your “sensational obsession with your carpet.”) While it may not be as absurd as the rest of it, everything in the film is tightly controlled. In editing, May insisted on perfection and repeated scenes until they were perfect, but while such a control-freak tendency was justified by, say, Stanley Kubrick, it was not so with Elaine May.
“A New Leaf” went over budget and over schedule, and when May appeared ten months later in the editing room with a rough three-and-a-half-hour draft, Paramount’s Robert Evans decided to ignore May’s contract (which gave him final cut) and cut the movie down to 102 minutes. (Matthau, who turned out to be Henry himself, took the studio’s side.) Angered that control of his film had been taken from him in such a blatantly public way, May sued the studio to have his name removed from its debts; he lost after the judge ruled that the final cut was still funny.
“A New Leaf” made money and led May to helm another classic comedy, 1972’s “The Heartbreak Kid.” But for this self-taught intellectual, it was the beginning of a slow heartbreak, as the drama “A New Leaf” would repeat itself during May’s tragically short tenure as director. Speaking, fired, and given no doubt, May struggled to control all four films he directed between 1971 and 1987; finally, the early criticism of his film “Ishtar” will kill his directing career.
Now at the age of 93, he rarely does interviews and rarely appears in public. And why him? The movie industry, a suitor she never wanted in the first place, tried to kill her. She is not a sad Henrietta, but every time someone finds a “New Leaf,” their immortality is confirmed.
