A lonely woman, a hard-workin' typist, meets a lonely - and younger - man. Despite a few moments of hesitation (is she ready to settle down?) she eventually marries him and everything looks bright. It turns out the man is lying his way through life - he has been married, and his wife, well, she ended up with his father, something that has 'slipped' his mind, only to be revealed, violently. The wife tries to sort things out. She still loves her. The man goes crazy after a big revelation in the dark psychosexual regions. Autumn leaves (dir. Robert Aldrich) is a melodrama and also a film about psychiatry. It is unclear whether the image of medicalized psychology is positive or not; all we see is: it works. Electric shocks make a man sane and even love survives. At the same time, the young man's way of repressing and forgetting the truth is not something that one shakes off easily. Autumn leaves is a raunchier than the most obvious form of love-oozing drama, darker, too. We never quite know how to interpret the ending scene. Are these people deluded? The question this film asks is: what is the difference between love and need? In what way do we need the people we love? In what ways can that need be perverted, or is it perverted already? The woman becomes a mother for the young man, and this is hardly something Aldrich treats as a neutral fact. Somebody called the film an oedipal nightmare and I tend to agree. This is a rough film packaged in Nat King Cole's croon - if one wanted to, one could say that Autumn leaves treats the run-of-the-mill romance in a tone of parania. The two protagonists' fears mingle, and what we end up with is not so glossy as one might first think.
Joan Crawford looks great.
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