In her last movie as a romantic lead, Joan Crawford plays a chronically single typist hungry but not actively searching for love, concluding long ago that she missed her shot. Written by Jean Rouverol, Lewis Meltzer, and Robert Blees, and directed by soon-to-be What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) collaborator Robert Aldrich, Autumn Leaves (1956) makes the serendipity with which Crawford’s character, Milly, unexpectedly finds late-in-life romance easy but the post-honeymoon period patience-testingly hard. 

It’s a May-December romance that the pragmatic Milly finds hard to sit with. She preemptively cuts things off after a second date in order to protect herself from the realistic possibility of abandonment for someone closer in age to her suitor. The man Milly begins to see, a 30-something Army vet named Burt (Cliff Robertson), really does come out of what seems like nowhere. She’s dining out alone, and since he is too, he insists on sitting and talking with her. He quickly finds more appreciation in her wit and intelligence than ostensibly any other man she’s met in her life. Autumn Leaves disappointingly keeps the majority of their early interactions off camera — their chemistry is good enough that you want to see what they talk about as the hours pass during their first encounter — but Crawford’s poignant evocation of Milly’s self-protectiveness and -consciousness makes her gradual softening to the idea of being loved affecting.

It feels like a betrayal when it starts to emerge that Burt is not quite the faultless Prince Charming type he initially seems to be. Could this movie, which seems to care far more about the well-being and romantic viability of middle-aged women than the better part of its era’s (and every era after that) crop of movies, actually be crueler than it at first seems, seeking to punish Milly for going out on a romantic limb past when society generally deems it acceptable? It seems possible for a while, especially after Burt starts having PTSD flare-ups that intermingle with soapy reveals about a years-ago breach of trust by his first wife (Vera Miles) and his father (Lorne Greene). 

Lorne Greene and Joan Crawford in Autumn Leaves.

Autumn Leaves turns out not to want to humiliate its lead, played by an actress by then long iconic for playing extraordinary-woman types. It has other things on its mind: how most healthy romantic relationships necessitate taking seriously a person’s totality rather than expecting them to conform to something they’re not; the dangerousness of stigmatizing mental illness, whose treatment in the film is progressively seen as no more shameful than tending to a bleeding wound.

How Autumn Leaves expands on those two ideas is fraught, though. Milly will endure explosions of physical abuse as Burt, who can’t remember his own wrongdoing moments later, descends into psychosis; the film sees her suffering through it as more nobly romantic than it probably ought to. And the glimpses it shows into the psychiatric hospital to which Milly has Burt temporarily committed edge into sensationalism. Hans J. Salter’s score pounds; an earlier sensitivity around mental illness feels almost entirely contradicted. (The movie’s climactic positing that unstable mental health is something that can be neatly fixed and not something to be continuously tended to is also dated.) 

But I like how Autumn Leaves, despite its missteps, seems poised for overwrought melodrama only to go to more mature, thoughtful places, trading in gasp-inducing twisty-turniness for emotional nuance and complexity. As campily good as it is, it almost feels like a shame that Crawford and Aldrich’s next movie together was not something in a similarly adult vein but something more garish, turning its aged leads into curios in a way that would thereafter make the public see them a little differently.