A comedy legend by the start of the 1970s thanks to her pioneering work with Mike Nichols, Elaine May was set to take her place among the pantheon of young Hollywood filmmakers when she embarked on her directorial debut in 1970 for Paramount. Based on a black comedy short story by crime fiction writer Jack Ritchie entitled "The Green Heart," A New Leaf started out as just a screenplay for May who ended up taking the reins as both director and actor out of necessity to preserve what she felt was the integrity of the project -- something that ended up earning a lot of industry press coverage when the budget and edited process far exceeded expectations. As a result, her initial, nearly completed three-hour cut ended up being taken away and shortened to 102 minutes, leading to her very vocal protests and an attempt to take her name off the film. The end result was still well received though, and the ensuing years have only elevated its status as one of the truly great 1970s comedies with both May and Walter Matthau (fresh off his very contentious experience with Hello, Dolly!) giving performances so note-perfect you can't imagine anyone else playing the roles.

Living in extreme denial, Henry Graham (Matthau) is informed by his family attorney that the considerable family money funding his easy, work-free lifestyle has now been depleted. Since he has no qualifications or abilities to pursue a job, he takes his valet's suggestion and goes hunting for a potential rich wife to keep him in the lifestyle to which he has become accustomed. However, he also makes the questionable decision to tide himself over in the interim by taking out a $50,000 loan from his outrageously opportunistic uncle, Harry (Coco), on the condition that he marries and pays back the sum in six weeks or hands over all of his remaining possessions. With the clock ticking, he soon opts for socially awkward but very rich botany professor Henrietta Lowell (May) and tangles with her swindling lawyer, Andy (Weston), as well as her equally mercenary household staff. Soon a murder plan and Henrietta's dream of discovering and naming a new kind of plant intersect as a very unusual kind of relationship begins to bloom.

Sharp, colorful, and witty, A New Leaf still doesn't betray all of its production pains if you simply watch it on its own terms. At its core, this is a complicated and acidic look at the human expectation for partnership and all that entails; though the initial version featured two actual murders committed by Henry to foil a blackmail plot, even the final result leaves you questioning what passes for "love" in a standard romantic comedy. Matthau was already specializing in playing irredeemable characters you still love to watch anyway (The Fortune Cookie probably being the closest comparison here), and that approach feels entirely fresh here in the context of May's endearing Henrietta, a character unlike anyone we'd really seen in a movie to that point. It's also quite a brutal takedown of the consequences of hoarded wealth resulting in hollow offspring, leading down a path that would normally seem like a happy ending but feels more akin to another film shot almost simultaneously, Something for Everyone.

Released on VHS by Paramount, A New Leaf has since been licensed out to boutique labels on disc including its Blu-ray premiere from Olive Films (no extras and featuring an okay HD scan likely prepared for broadcast) in 2012, with a simultaneous DVD option. In the U.K., Eureka released a Blu-ray from the same master in 2015 as a combo pack with a DVD featuring a video essay by David Cairns ("The Bluebeard of Happiness") and an insert booklet with an essay by Glenn Kenny. In 2017, Olive revisited the film as one of its Signature Edition titles featuring a new master from a 4K scan and an audio commentary by Maya Montanez Smukler. It's a dense and insightful track with a very thorough history of the film's production and the trends of male and female talents around that time; however, the movie audio running underneath her discussion can get loud and distracting at times, which is a shame. In "The Cutting Room Floor" (12m59s), assistant editor Angelo Corrao gives his own impressions of being a young neophyte in the business, the drama over the final cut of the film, May's insistence he go to court on her behalf, and his memories of the positive nature of working with her. In "Women in Hollywood: A Tragedy of Comic Proportions" (7m1s), the mighty Amy Heckerling (bathed in some of the heaviest, weirdest video filtering you've ever seen) talks about the inspiration she took from May's career, her own path forged to becoming a director and dealing with tricky material, the studio nervousness she had to deal with, and the aspects of this film that resonate with her. The terrible theatrical trailer is also included (no wonder the film initially underperformed), plus a text essay by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas ("Ode on a Grecian Nightgown") included both as a video feature and an inclusion in the insert booklet for some reason (plus the original short story).

In 2025, Vinegar Syndrome imprint Cinématographe released a big upgrade across the board as a UHD and Blu-ray set with the usual elaborate, impressive packaging featuring a fold-out poster with art by cartoonist Michael DeForge and a thick booklet with essays by Sarah Fensom, Elena Lazic, Willow Catelyn Maclay, and Hannah Strong plus an archival one by Richard Brody. Together they form a thorough study of the film including its studio issues including casting, the ultimate advantages of Matthau's displeasure being on the set, and ways to read its approach to comedy and what the current cut still manages to slip under the radar. The new 4K scan (with HDR10-compatible Dolby Visino on the UHD) improves quite visibly over the two prior Blu-ray presentations with much punchier and healthier colors as well as finer details for hair, foliage, etc. The DTS-HD MA 2.0 English mono track sounds excellent as well and features optional English SDH subtitles. Here Smukler returns for a new track joined by K.J. Relth-Miller, and it's a better recorded track providing an insightful and engaging chronicle of how the film came to be, what made May a singular voice at the time, and the role it served at a key point in the evolution of American cinema and how it treated the roles of men and women. In "Director Jail" (22m30s), Carrie Courogen, author of Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius, recounts how she became drawn to May and explores how the reclusive artist's work has often been misunderstand or underestimated all the way through Ishtar. In "Looking for Elaine May" (14m53s), Heller-Nicholas talks about the reception to May and her films as well as her reticent approach to making movies divorced from the usual motives. A 2006 conversation with May and Nichols Film at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater (69m3s) is a great chat between the friends and colleagues, starting off with a great point about Ishtar and then delivering a slew of stories and lessons from their careers together and apart as they dealt with the whims of studios under different regimes. Then you get an episode of the American Film Institute's Silver Streams podcast (48m22s) from 2021 running down all the essentials of this film as well as May's work as a director and a screenwriter (credited or not). The Corrao and Heckerling featurettes and trailer from the prior release are included here as well.

Cinématographe (UHD)

Olive Films (2017 Blu-ray)

Reviewed on September 21, 2025