A NEW LEAF is so consistently side-splittingly funny that it always puzzles me that Elaine May sought an injunction from Paramount when they released the film and it opened at Radio City Music Hall. She was fighting them to take her name off the film up until the last minute because she said it was not her version.
Well, I never did see the Director's Cut of this movie, but I can tell you that A NEW LEAF is one of the funniest films of its kind I've ever seen in a memory that goes back to Charlie Chaplan's 1947 masterpiece, MONSIEUR VERDOUX about a serial murderer of rich wives.
If Miss May's version seems more like a series of TV blackout sketches, that may be due to the fact that she and Mike Nichols wrote some of the best comedy sketches to ever appear in that medium. Here the joke is extended for an hour and forty-two minutes as Matthau attempts to find a suitably rich wife that will enable him to resume his life as a wealthy man--without her.
It's so full of wonderful comic moments involving him and the clumsy, near-sighted botanist (Elaine May) who falls deeply in love with him and, in the end, makes him a better man. Their scenes together are matchless for pure comedy technique with every line uttered with such complete mastery of the art.
Summing up: A barrel of laughs.
Well, I never did see the Director's Cut of this movie, but I can tell you that A NEW LEAF is one of the funniest films of its kind I've ever seen in a memory that goes back to Charlie Chaplan's 1947 masterpiece, MONSIEUR VERDOUX about a serial murderer of rich wives.
If Miss May's version seems more like a series of TV blackout sketches, that may be due to the fact that she and Mike Nichols wrote some of the best comedy sketches to ever appear in that medium. Here the joke is extended for an hour and forty-two minutes as Matthau attempts to find a suitably rich wife that will enable him to resume his life as a wealthy man--without her.
It's so full of wonderful comic moments involving him and the clumsy, near-sighted botanist (Elaine May) who falls deeply in love with him and, in the end, makes him a better man. Their scenes together are matchless for pure comedy technique with every line uttered with such complete mastery of the art.
Summing up: A barrel of laughs.