Jonathan Rosenbaum on ELAINE MAY:
“Both comedies are striking in the way they set up an uneasy audience identification with a self-absorbed hero bent on ditching his unsuspecting newlywed wife, rubbing our noses in everything about her that he finds disgusting and abhorrent while creating a surprising amount of empathy and compassion for her as well. It’s a volatile emotional mixture, and if either movie had been directed by a man, charges of misogyny would have seemed almost obligatory. Furthermore, the fact that May cast herself and her daughter as the victimized spouses only added to the effrontery. (May’s gawky performance in A New Leaf and its calculated power to embarrass recalls the physical comedy of Jerry Lewis, whereas Berlin’s in The Heartbreak Kid was sufficiently touching to win her an Oscar nomination.) Combining a passionate will to power as a writer-director with a ferocious autocritique is perhaps the single thematic preoccupation May shares with both Welles and Lewis, and it marks her as an equally dangerous filmmaker.”
(…)
”**May mentioned that her first choice for the male lead was actually Christopher Plummer (whose agent turned the part down before Plummer heard about it), and that she wound up playing the female lead largely because she wanted to avoid the studio’s own casting suggestions (which included Carol Channing). She described the murder of Weston as the funniest thing she ever saw Matthau do (and told me she doesn’t know if the footage of this scene still exists), and added that this scene was cut because the Production Code wouldn’t allow his character to get away with murder.”
