In 1950, when the song was finally translated into English, only a small part of the opening verse survived (and that was rarely sung). With her smoky voice and languid phrasing, she brings an especially erotic spin to it, conveying the sense that she will never again love so intensely. The stunning, perpetually black-clad “Little Miss Existentialist” recorded it several times but, as with Montand, her early versions are best. While the song belongs to Montand, there was another memorable version by French chanteuse Juliette Greco. Within a few years, it became his biggest hit and most requested song. No beat, an over-complicated structure, a relentlessly sad message-it had everything going against it. Kosma interpreted it as 24 bars of introductory verse containing two distinct moods and melodies, followed by a 16-bar refrain (half the length of a traditional Tin Pan Alley song).Ĭarné’s film flopped, but the lead actor, a popular young singer named Yves Montand, took a liking to “Les Feuilles Mortes.” Though he didn’t sing it in the picture, he added it to his concert repertoire.
Maybe because the words weren’t conceived in song form, it took on a slightly unwieldy structure. Two years later, when director Marcel Carné made a film of the ballet, a Hungarian-born film composer named Joseph Kosma set Prévert’s poem to music. It was written by screenwriter and Left Bank intellectual Jacques Prévert as part of the script for a ballet called Le Rendezvous. The song began its life in 1945 as a poem. The translated version, “Autumn Leaves,” touched on the same theme, but in a gentler, more wistful way. The original, written in French as “Les Feuilles Mortes” (literally, “Dead Leaves”) was a dark lament of lost love and regret. Versions: Juliette Greco, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Sarah Vaughan, Eartha Kitt, Bill Evans, Miles Davis Performers: Yves Montand (France), Nat King Cole (U.S.) Writers: Jacques Prévert and Joseph Kosma “Le Feuilles Mortes,” adapted as “Autumn Leaves”