The uproarious A New Leaf should have marked the arrival of an offbeat new comedy star

Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases or premieres, or occasionally our own inscrutable whims. This week, we’re looking back on films that feature great comedic performances that the Academy didn’t nominate for Best Actor or Best Actress.
A New Leaf (1971)
The directing career of Elaine May, the godmother of improv and queen of the script doctors, ended twice—first with Mikey And Nicky, one of the great offbeat buddy movies, and then, more than a decade later, with Ishtar, her oddly prescient (but over-budgeted) satire of blundering American intervention in the Middle East. Lesser talents had bounced back from much bigger flops; the fact that she was a woman in what was (and is) still a male-dominated industry probably had something to do with it. But her tiny filmography is really the story of two careers cut short. The most gifted female performer of the generation that basically invented American live comedy as we know it, May only ever got one real showcase role, starring as Henrietta Lowell, a clueless botanist with a big inheritance, in her hilariously dark directorial debut, A New Leaf.
May first found fame as one half of a comedy duo (with Mike Nichols, who also became a film director), which probably explains why most of her movies center on pairs—in this case, Henrietta and Henry (Walter Matthau, cast wildly against type), the curmudgeonly playboy who marries her for the money, plotting to kill his new bride so he can go back a luxurious bachelor lifestyle. Both are fantastic comic performances with an unsentimental edge: Matthau plays Henry as an unlikely mix of W.C. Fields and Cary Grant, while May never lets Henrietta’s ugly-duckling obliviousness curdle into something sweet.