Autumn Leaves
Screening on Film
Directed by Robert Aldrich.
With Joan Crawford, Vera Miles, Lorne Greene.
US, 1956, 35mm, black & white, 107 min.
With Joan Crawford, Vera Miles, Lorne Greene.
US, 1956, 35mm, black & white, 107 min.
Autumn Leaves is the quintessential late Hollywood melodrama—lurid, strange and overheated by the torrid winds of incestuous passion. Joan Crawford stars, in what is arguably her finest late-career performance, as a lonely-heart stenographer who falls hard for the wrong man, a baby-faced war veteran, played by Cliff Robertson, harboring unsettling secrets. Aldrich releases Gothic shadows into his streamlined narrative, which boils over to an uncomfortable and unforgettable climax. Autumn Leaves was Aldrich’s first entry into the so-called “woman’s picture,” a genre he would later explode—almost gleefully—in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and, to a certain extent, in The Killing of Sister George.
