Reflections on ... Autumn Leaves (1956)

Friday night (5 October) we watched the gloriously tortured melodrama Autumn Leaves (1956) – an ideal way to conclude the British Film Institute’s Joan Crawford retrospective (Fierce: The Untameable Joan Crawford, August - October 2018). 

I was very disciplined about this Crawford season and only saw two other films: the freaky silent horror movie The Unknown (1927) (all about extreme body modification / amputation and obsessive love, which teamed young starlet Crawford with Lon Chaney as an armless knife thrower!) and A Woman’s Face (1941) (in which Crawford portrays an embittered facially-disfigured criminal who changes her ways once she undergoes plastic surgery and finds love). 

In the fifties, cinema’s bitch goddess extraordinaire Crawford made a whole cycle of middle-aged women-in peril-films that found her in love with dangerous younger men (see also Sudden Fear (1952) and Female on the Beach (1955)) - all of them great. In Autumn Leaves Crawford is Millicent Wetherby, a prim, lonely and quietly desperate forty-something spinster who finds herself unexpectedly romantically entangled with dishy, significantly younger man Burt Hanson (Cliff Robertson). They impulsively marry, and Millicent soon discovers – too late! – that she knows almost nothing about her profoundly troubled, weirdly childlike and secretive new husband. 

Millicent is meant to be a frumpy and sexually repressed typist, thus Crawford’s onscreen wardrobe is mostly restricted to high-necked, ultra-modest blouses and full skirts, with cardigans draped around her shoulders – but that “mousy” wardrobe is by Hollywood costume designer deluxe Jean Louis! Think haute couture librarian. (Crawford also wears a seriously pointy and gravity-defying underwired bullet bra throughout).

(An aside: Crawford was the original choice to play the role of Karen Holmes in the film From Here to Eternity (1953). Deborah Kerr was ultimately cast instead when the producers balked at Crawford’s demand that she bring her own cameraman. The single most famous image from From Here to Eternity is of Kerr and leading man Burt Lancaster kissing passionately on the beach while the surf crashes and foams around them. Interestingly, Autumn Leaves painstakingly recreates this scene!).

If – like me – you love watching Crawford undergo heavy emotional anguish, this is the film for you! In a mesmerizing, almost operatic performance Crawford’s face gradually becomes a taut, tense mask of suffering. (No one does eyes-glistening-with-tears quite like Crawford). Cliff Robertson is impressively tormented as Burt (a study of 1950s masculinity in crisis to compare with Robert Stack in Written on the Wind or James Mason in Bigger Than Life) and is fit as fuck (especially when wearing a white t-shirt so tight the outlines of his nipples are visible!). Stir into the mix Nat King Cole crooning the lushly romantic title track, Lorne Green and Vera Miles as a pair of genuinely sleazy villains, a  shocking scene of domestic violence and brutal close-ups of electric shock therapy and you get a vividly memorable and exemplary atomic-era “woman’s picture”. 

Perhaps the zenith of Crawford’s performance is when she encounters Green and Miles on the street and tears into them with a vengeful rant. "Where's your decency?” Millicent demands. “ In what garbage dump, Mr Hanson? And where's yours, you tramp? You his loving, doting fraud of a father and you, you slut! You're both consumed with evil so rotten your filthy souls are too evil for hell itself!" 

Autumn Leaves was directed by the hard-boiled Robert Aldrich (who makes some virtuoso, jarring stylistic choices. I especially love Aldrich's strange, dream-like flashback to Millicent's life as a younger woman). As viewers of Feud: Bette and Joan already know, Crawford and Aldrich would triumphantly reunite in 1962 for Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Anna Karina at The British Film Institute

/ The sublime Danish actress Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa vie (1962) /

Anna Karina – the elfin Bambi-eyed star of French New Wave 1960s cinema - graced The British Film Institute in person on Saturday 16 January 2016 last night as part of its Jean-Luc Godard season. (Godard and Karina were married between 1961-1967. She was Godard’s muse and the leading lady of his definitive early films). First was a screening of Godard’s sublime 1962 nouvelle vague masterpiece Vivre sa vie (in which Karina plays a wannabe actress who drifts into prostitution with tragic consequences. She is wrenching in the film). Then Karina was invited onstage for an interview (by film critic Jason Solomons) followed by a Q&A session with the audience.

Pal and I were in the back row, but I can confirm the 75-year old Karina is still svelte and her heart-shaped cheekbones still intact, although her voice is now a raspy croak – Karina has evidently smoked a lot of Gauloises (or Gitaines?) over the decades. She was endearingly dotty and eccentric – clearly still a mischievous free spirit and bohemian. It’s hard to believe Karina isn’t French (she’s Danish, born in 1940 in Copenhagen): her accent sounds impeccably French, her demeanour is so old-school Parisian and she’s the absolute mistress of the dismissive Gallic shrug.

And Karina did a lot of Gallic shrugging! There was definitely a language barrier. Karina’s answers would drift, dither and meander, sometimes missing the point.  After an audience member would ask a question, Karina would turn to the onstage interviewer with a quizzical expression. After a while Solomon exclaimed, “Don’t look at me – I didn’t ask the question!” When someone asked what her strangest experience was working on a film, she snapped “Strange? What’s strange?” When people probed too deeply about Godard’s motivations and thought processes, she replied, exasperated, “I didn’t direct the film!” Asked whether it was provocative or scandalous to play a prostitute in 1962, she demurred, “Because I played a prostitute didn’t mean I was a prostitute!” (But Karina added the Parisian “working girls” she encountered on the street afterward would approach her and say they approved of her portrayal and found it truthful).

/ Above: some pretty grainy and pixellated shots of Karina onstage at The BFI with journalist Jason Solomons (Pal took them on his iPhone from the back row!) /

The questioners seemed fixated on Karina’s hairstyle and wardrobe in Vivre sa vie, which she accepted with good grace. Was the black bob inspired by Louise Brooks?  Karina revealed her hair in the film was actually a wig. It began as a very long wig and the stylist kept cutting it shorter and shorter. She didn’t know – maybe! People compared it to Louise Brooks afterwards. As for the clothes: they look astonishingly cool to modern eyes - that late fifties / early sixties period was the acme of style for both men and women (same era as the early seasons of TV's Mad Men).  The 22-year old Karina certainly looks sensational in her simple pencil skirts, ruffled blouses and cardigans – although she would have looked chic in a potato sack.

One annoying question actually led to an interesting response. Weirdly, one woman asked Karina what young modern actresses she admired. (Did the questioner honestly think Karina was going to reply, “Jennifer Lawrence!”?) Karina seemed nonplussed, asked her to repeat the question and then confessed she has a hard time keeping track of new actors, there are so many. They don’t usually make an impression on her unless they’ve been around a few years and become established. Then somehow the subject changed to what actresses Karina admired when she was growing up and the answer was more illuminating: Judy Garland, Ava Gardner and Edith Piaf. In terms of warmth, radiance and the capacity for expressing both hurt and happiness, you can clearly see the influence of Garland and Piaf on Karina’s acting.

I learned afterwards of one fascinating movie factoid from one of Karina’s other onstage interview sessions for a different film at The BFI. (Karina was interviewed about three times at The BFI while she was in London). She was asked about Godard’s Le Mepris (1963), in which Karina herself does not appear. Instead, Brigitte Bardot gives one of her best performances in the role of Camille. Bardot was always Godard’s first choice – but according to Karina, the producers pressured Godard to consider another great European art cinema leading lady of the period – Italy’s tousle-haired blonde lioness and Michelangelo Antonioni's muse, Monica Vitti. I revere the gorgeous Vitti and she would have been great – but very different – as Camille. Godard met with her in Rome to discuss Le Mepris. Vitti arrived an hour late and reportedly stared out the window the whole time, indifferent. So the role went to Bardot instead and the rest is history. Interestingly, for segments of Le Mepris Bardot dons a short jet-black wig that recalls ... Anna Karina in Vivre sa vie!

/ Brigitte Bardot in Le Mepris (1963) /

My highlights: Karina described how, when she first arrived in Paris as a 17-year old runaway, she was “discovered” in the cafe Les Deux Magots and snapped-up to be a fashion model. One day on a photo shoot she was telling the hair stylist or make-up artist she wanted to be an actress; an older woman with a big hat smoking a cigar overhead and inquired what Karina’s name was. When Karina replied “Hanne Karin Blarke Bayer”, the woman announced, “You should call yourself Anna Karina!” Afterwards Karina learned the mysterious older woman was – Coco Chanel! The final question of the night was: what was Karina’s mindset as a teenager, hitchhiking to Paris on her own, not speaking a word of French? Karina recalled how poor she was on arrival (she owned one pair of high heels and one black dress) and expressed astonishment at how brave and gutsy she’d been. (Karina admitted her motivation was to escape her unhappy home life with her mother and abusive stepfather). How lucky for generations of cinema goers Anna Karina that did flee to Paris when she did!

Further reading:

Anna Karina: Two or Three Things We Know About Her: You can watch videos of Karina's Q&A sessions at The BFI here

A sweet and very revealing interview with Karina in The Guardian