AUTUMN LEAVES: Mommy Dearest the magnificent

A young man with a mommy fixation really couldn't do better or worse than focusing their attention on the biggest mother of them all - Joan Crawford. Here was a woman who presented herself to the world as an adoring, hands-on mother but who, if her ungrateful adopted daughter Christina is to be believed, was a sadistic monster.
A very young Cliff Robertson as Burt Hanson becomes enamoured of a considerably older Joan Crawford in AUTUMN LEAVES and won't take no for an answer. His relentless pursuit of Millicent Wetherby, a  lonely, middle-aged work from home typist for hire is disturbingly creepy; so creepy that even Millicent tries to push him away until that moment when Burt first locks lips and the floodgates of her long hibernated passion are thrown asunder.
Millicent Wetherby is the archetypal Crawford character of her1950s career. Every facet of Joan's film persona is on show here - the working class woman who's buried herself in work to forget her loneliness; who's hard as nails on the outside and rather masculine in appearance, but who's crying inside from the lack of male attention; who only ever attracts attention from the wrong kind of man, but takes it because deep down she believes that's all she deserves; and who's eyes can brim with tears at the drop of a hat and a moment later flash with barely suppressed fury.
There's no better Joan Crawford impersonator than Crawford herself.
What makes her performance in AUTUMN LEAVES even more rewarding is the knowledge that she'd fought tooth and nail to win this part, refusing to relinquish her leading lady status at an age when Hollywood consigned her type to character parts because, conventional wisdom had it, they were too old to be alluring anymore. Who's gonna pay to watch a 51 year old woman make out with a leading man young enough to be her son?
Crawford was either brave or desperate in taking on a part which required her to make numerous references to the fact that she was "too old" for her toyboy suitor, and to function as his mother as much as his lover. I imagine she was willing to accept any number of indignities if it meant she retained her leading lady status and kept her name above the title.
And she was right to do so. AUTUMN LEAVES is a 100 per cent Crawford star vehicle. That she's playing a character named Millicent Wetherby is irrelevant really. She's playing herself and doing so magnificently. 
If you want to understand what it really means to be an old school film star you need look no further than AUTUMN LEAVES.