“When Henry Graham (Walter Matthau) learns that his fortune has finally run out, he is overwhelmed with quite reasonable self-pity. ‘All I am - or was - is rich. It's all I wanted to be.' Henry's butler agrees: ‘You'll be poor in the only real sense - in that you'll have no money.' The desperate problem demands a desperate solution: Henry decides to marry an heiress and then get rid of her with all possible dispatch.

“A New Leaf, which was written and directed by Elaine May, who also co-stars in the film, is the story of Henry's reluctant character reformation through the love of a rich woman. It's also a beautifully and gently cockeyed movie that recalls at least two different traditions of American film comedy to which I've always been partial.

“Not since the two-reelers of the 1930s in which Edgar Kennedy, the genius of the slow burn, made his accommodation with the idiocies of Florence Lake, his birdbrained wife, have there been displays of anger, frustration and greed as marvelous as those of Matthau in A New Leaf. Then, too, A New Leaf shares with the great screwball comedies of the Depression an almost childlike appreciation of money: it may not buy happiness, but having a lot of it helps.

“Essentially, however, A New Leaf is a love story, since Henry Graham and Henrietta Lowell (Miss May) are eccentrics who could have been made for nobody but each other. He is a misanthropic, suspicious, hand-tailored, high-living playboy, whose preference is for Chateau Lafitte '61, while she is a sweet, trusting, sloppy, near-sighted botanist, who drinks Mogen David Extra Heavy Malaga (‘every year is good'), and who also happens to be loaded with money.

“...The entire project is touched by a fine and knowing madness.”