Daily Archives: February 24, 2026

A NEW LEAF

A catalogue entry for the 2022 Viennale. –J.R.

Elaine May’s hilarious, edgy first feature is her only one that differs substantially from what she intended. Her three-hour rough cut included two murders committed by the antihero (Walter Matthau), of a blackmailer and a crooked lawyer (Jack Weston), that the studio excised, yet A New Leaf registers with audiences as her sweetest, most tender picture. The irony is that Matthau’s character — a self-absorbed idler who exhausts his inheritance, then goes looking for a wealthy bride he can murder in order to keep his luxuries (and finding a clueless, clumsy botanist, deftly played by May) — is hardly the sort one expects to solicit such emotions, even without his two murders. But a specialist in creating lovable monsters, predators and innocents alike, May is clearly up to the challenge.

Reading Jack Ritchie’s short story “The Green Heart” that she adapted, included with the Olive Films Blu-Ray, clarifies the much blacker comedy she had in mind, achieving her sweet finale only after more challenging discomforts en route. And what she added to this story — such as the antihero’s Ferreri, butler, and uncle, and two potential brides preceding the botanist — may matter as much as what the studio removed. Read more

Trying To Catch Up With Raúl Ruiz: A Conversation with Jonathan Rosenbaum

This appeared Cinema Scope no. 11 (summer 2002).Thanks to Francois Thomas in helping me clean up my German and French. — J.R.

“You can’t smell email,” Raúl Ruiz insisted to me the night before we had this interview at the 2002 Rotterdam Film Festival, explaining to me why he didn’t have any truck with the Internet. He added that lately he’s been collecting various first editions, excommunications, and death sentences, many of them from the 19th century and earlier, and he can smell all of them.

At first I was surprised by this old-fashioned form of resistance, but then the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Raúl is basically a 19th century figure. His largely Borgesian canon of 19th and early 20th century English and American writers (Chesterton, Stevenson, Wells, Harte, Hawthorne, Melville, et al) and his taste for rambling narratives and tales within tales smacks of a Victorian temperament.

I first encountered Ruiz’s work during my first trip to the Rotterdam Film Festival, in 1983, and it was there where we first became friends three years later —- as well as where we had this interview on January 26, in the lobby of the hotel where we were both staying. Read more