Autumn Leaves

Part film noir, part love story, and part social message film, Robert Aldrich’s Autumn Leaves dazzles in its ability to combine postwar loneliness, sacrificial love, and violent psychopathy into a tale of romantic suspense with a pained heart. Joan Crawford plays Mildred Wetherby, a lonely spinster determined to be happy all by herself until the young, handsome Burt Hanson (Cliff Robertson) sweeps her off her resistant feet, landing into a horizontal beach embrace a la From Here to Eternity. Act One leads with her memory of being dumped because she loved her father more than her boyfriend (a beautifully designed sequence at the symphony), while Act Two becomes an all-too-realistic portrayal of a marriage poisoned by mental illness (in which a typewriter can serve as a weapon). Vera Miles is ethereally beautiful as Burt’s ex-wife Virginia who comes calling to expose both the skeletons in Burt’s closet and her own moral transgressions (“Your filthy souls are too evil for hell itself,” responds Millie later). Cinematographer Charles Lang creates stunning B&W compositions and uses continuous oblique camera angles to convey instability throughout Burt’s asylum treatment and Millie’s frantic climb up four flights to beat Burt to his father’s hotel room.