6:30 p.m.	Autumn Leaves Robert Aldrich (U.S., 1956)

In the murky interior of her California bungalow, middle-aged typist Millicent Wetherby (Joan Crawford) succumbs to the attentions of a much younger man (Cliff Robertson). Despite her misgivings, she marries him, only to realize he’s not well in the head, having been traumatized by his ex-wife’s cuckolding of him with his own dear daddy (Lorne Green). The Aldrich grotesquerie commences: hands are wrung, knuckles are gnawed, neuroses are examined, a typewriter is hurled. Throughout it all, the wife/mother endures as her husband/invalid/child tantrums. “You’re confusing a need with me,” she tells Robertson, but it becomes clear the need is a reciprocal one. Crawford, her face lean and mask-like, draws out the darkest undertones of this “woman’s picture,” escalating a tale of female desire to one of hysterical obsession and Hitchcockian tension. And Nat “King” Cole’s syrupy title refrain further subverts the genre’s clichés, adding no romance, just dead leaves.

—Lucy Laird

• Written by Jack Jevne, Lewis Meltzer, Robert Blees. Photographed by Charles Lang. With Joan Crawford, Cliff Robertson, Vera Miles, Lorne Greene. (108 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Sony Pictures)