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.