AUTUMN LEAVES (1956) *** Joan Crawford would have been compelling standing straight up and reading, you know, anything, Sidney Sheldon or the business section. Fortunately she does more than that here, though she moves slowly so it takes awhile to digest that she's allowed a younger ex-Sergeant to pick her up at a Hollywood diner and accompany her home on the bus. How surprising then, when it turns out that he's a tie salesman with a tentative grasp on everything but the unpaid for "gifts" he brings home. Enter that most controversial California invention, the psychiatrist Shepperd Strudwick, all of which gives Joan a series of opportunities to run a rainbow of variations on taut. Of course when those rubber bands get tight enough they snap, on one occasion at Lorne Greene for wandering over from the "Bonanza" set, but her vituperations alchemize to waves of audience joy, transmogrified by the screen. Anyway the psychiatric methods of the day look a little shaky to me, and were enough so to British censors that this was rated X on the strength of no nudity, drug use, particularly bad language, or anything else more terrifying than a first draft contemplation of the human mind. Maybe they just thought it was their duty to head such nonsense off at the pass.
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