Harold and Maude is a 1971 movie, directed by Hal Ashby. The screenplay on which the film was based was written by Colin Higgins , and published as a novel in 1984.

Harold looks adoringly on Maude

Summary

The film first introduces us to Harold, an alienated teenaged boy from a wealthy family who lives in a large mansion with his dominating mother. Harold stages realistic mock suicides. This has evidently been going on for so long that his mother takes no notice, other than when Harold causes a particular mess with his fake blood. For amusement, Harold attends funerals of people he doesn't know. At these he repeatedly sees Maude, a 79 year-old woman who befriends him. Maude is very much his opposite: energetic, impulsive, and light-hearted. The two form an unlikely friendship, then romance.

The film features both dark and light humor, social satire (including anti-war), promotes the notion of living life to its fullest, and has long had a cult following.

Themes

Hal Ashby, the director of the film, was part of the San Fransisco youth culture, and his film posits the doomed youth of the alienated against the vital age of the Holocaust survivors. (In a brief glance, Harold sees a tattoo of an identification number on Maude's forearm.) While Harold is part of a society where he can have no importance and no meaning, Maude has survived against totalitarianism. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, Harold can only feel significant by dying. Maude, on the other hand, is a fictionalizer and a dreamer. She imagines beauty where there is none, believes in the innate goodness of people (but not the state), and practices what she calls her own, individual, revolution. Her backstory is only hinted in the film, for Ashby avoids any didacticism. She tells Harold at one point about Alfred Dreyfus seeing fantastic birds on Devil's Island and finding out later that they were only seagulls. She says that to her they would always be fantastic birds.

Reception

Harold and Maude would be a strange film no matter when it was released, but, even in the excessive cinema of the 1970s, it was stridently out of step with mainstream cinema. It was a commercial failure when it was released and divided critics. Most audiences could focus on little more than the idea of romantic love between the old and young (while the act of sex is implied and then confirmed verbally, the relatively minor act of mouth to mouth kissing is not actually shown in the movie). Its cult appeal lay in its black comedic suicides and the alienation Bud Cort conveyed.

Cast

• Marjorie Chardin (Maude): Ruth Gordon
• Harold Chasen: Bud Cort
• Mrs. Chasen: Vivian Pickles
• Glaucus: Cyril Cusack
• Uncle Victor: Charles Tyner
• Sunshine Doré: Ellen Geer
• Priest: Eric Christmas
• Psychiatrist: G. Wood
• Candy Gulf: Judy Engles
• Edith Phern: Shari Summers
• Motorcycle Officer: Tom Skerritt (as M. Borman)

Crew

• Cinematography by: John Alonzo

Music

The soundtrack is by Cat Stevens, and includes two songs which he composed specifically for the movie and which were unavailable for several decades on vinyl or cassette (they were later released on the compact disc Footsteps in the Dark).

Awards and nominations

• The film is number 45 on the American Film Institute's list of 100 Funniest Movies .
• In 1997 it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

External links

• The IMDb entry on Harold and Maude
• Harold and Maude, the unofficial homepage by Mike Sullivan
• Kierkegaard's Narrative: Harold and Maude

Quotes

• Harold and Maude at Wikiquote