Autumn Leaves

Although Aldrich won the Berlinale’s Silver Bear for Best Director for "Autumn Leaves", the film was long underestimated as a supposed studio project for star Joan Crawford. In fact, Aldrich had developed the material for his independent production company and, unexpectedly, conveyed his critical worldview (along with his penchant for noir undertones) in the form of a melodrama that veers into the abysmal right in the middle. Crawford plays Milly Wetherby, an independent typist whose persistent loneliness is disrupted by Burt (Cliff Robertson), a much younger war veteran. A new life seems to be beginning, until Milly discovers that Burt is a pathological liar repressing a terrible trauma. Aldrich unveils a gallery of toxic masculinity and dismantles a false sense of “normality”: the romance turns into an ambivalent vision of horror, exposing the false promises of the American Dream. (C.H.)