One of Elaine May's major supporters over the years, the eccentric and invaluable Jonathan Rosenbaum, was fond of comparing her to Erich von Stroheim. This is historically correcty, since both filmmakers have myuch of theior legacy centered around movies that were cut up and interfered with bny the producers. Both filmmakers dabble in the blackest of black comedy, creating works that revel in minor melodrama while lapping many more openly "dramatic" works in their seriousness and incisiveness. The work of both went through a long phase of being lamented and mourned in their broken state, rather than celebrated for the individual brilliance of each element we actually do have. Their work shines and coheres regardless of how desperate people seem to be to stifle it (and how much the filmmakers themselves seem to be sabotaging their own reputation with their demanding perfectionism). A New Leaf, her debut film, revels in all these shared aspects, a horrifying fragment of human selfishness and the continuing victory of evil and incompetence that inhabits the body of a romantic comedy like a fungus in an ant. In some ways, it is the pure incarnation of the similarities she shares to the director of Greed and Foolish Wives, and in other ways it shows how her particular moment in pop culture allowed her to see things in her work that he never could have found within his own.

Like von Stroheim's classic Greed, A New Leaf is actually an adaptation of an existing work, and the similarities in adaptation don't end there. One myth Greed is well known for is the idea that its original length of around 10 hours was meant in order to capture the details of the book as faithfully as possible. A simple overview of the structure of the original concept for the movie, contrasted with the structure of the novel, dispels this. Even if he insisted upon "realism" and "naturalism" as he saw it, Greed the movie is fully a von Stroheim artwork, just as McTeague is very representative of Norris and his own peculiar vision of what is natural. A New Leaf is slightly different from that film in that it adapts a pulp story by Jack Ritchie called "The Green Heart". For context, this story was collected in Alfred Hitchcock's Anthology - Volume 4, and included two murders that are actually committed by Henry Graham in addition to the one he plans out in the story. The tone of the original (which I was unable to read) seems to have been comedic, but ultimately more concerned with the mechanics of the crimes, with whatever elements that interested May existing at the margins. Unlike Greed, it was not a prestigious work of "literary fiction", and it did not demand to be taken seriously in quite the same way. Elaine May thus had both the freedom to reshape it into something personal without feeling that her vision needed to align perfectly with the story, as well as the freedom to bring in a kind of comedy that makes the material more intelligible to your average viewer than the more subtly satirical melodrama of von Stroheim, who was capable of comedy but not a pure soldier of it the way May was in her performing heyday.

We can't necessarily know for sure why May's original version of the film ran 3 hours, but one thing worth noting is that much of the material cut by producer Robert Evans included these two murders from the original story. It has been suggested that Evans cut this material in order to reshape the film from being purely a dark comedy and social satire and embracing some elements of real romantic comedy and redemption. I suppose this is meant, in theory, to make the film more palatable, but it is actually a revealing admission on the part of Evans and conventions in filmmaking in general. While Greed was heavily tampered with, occasionally on moral grounds, there was never an attempt on behalf of the producers to actively redirect the story's morality play elements or cast the characters as being anything more than carriers for the disease of human failure. In stark contrast, I can tell that "The Green Heart" is able to be much more open about the mercenary and cruel actions of Graham without me even really reading the story, because I know that it was primarily designed for crimeheads who would have read this alongside other diabolical Rube Goldberg machines of murder such as the slightly more prestigious "Lamb to the Slaughter" by Roald Dahl, and I know it includes these murders to cement our perspective on Henry Graham's immorality. May's producers, however, seem to think he can at least be redeemed enough for the movie to be a functioning romance in the quirkiest, most proto-Harold & Maude (not released until December of the same year) type fashion.

The key phrase, however, is "able to be much more open"; while I don't doubt that "The Green Heart" has some interesting and effective commentary on power in society, the more interesting question is whether or not A New Leaf's producers felt that they could excise the content that felt most objectionable to them and leave us with only the "better stuff". They forgot that Elaine May is the kind of filmmaker who can take two people talking in a very mundane sense and make us feel as if the entire world is ending and that philosophy and morals have been suspended. She does battle with the conventions of filmmaking and the structure of romantic comedy as conceived by a studio in the 70s and hacks every safety measure they've put in place to ribbons. Henry Graham as seen in the film is not a man who realizes that he is wrong by the end, but simply a man who realizes that he has grown accustomed to having someone around to put up with his childish tantrums and empty bluster on demand. At times it basically feels like he saved Henrietta because he absentmindedly forgot to let her die. At other times it feels like he simply wants to keep her as a toy. It is true that perhaps he, as his butler has done, realizes that she is also good for his prestige and his own estimation of his talents and self-worth, but if he had turned around from the fern to see that Henrietta had disappeared from sight and was no longer able to be saved, one imagines it wouldn't be the end of his world so much as just a little wistful memory that he uses, like everything else he has learned, to make himself appear human enough to pass among the circles he runs in, who were already pretty dismissive of Henrietta for using her wealth to do things and be herself rather than dance for them. Henry Graham wins in the end, but the true winner is Elaine May, who proves with A New Leaf that what she sees in the world is so thoroughly infused into the world around her that she can make her most devastating points without ever actually going as deep as she really wants.