Harold and Maude (1971)

Harold and Maude

Director: Hal Ashby

USA 1971

91 min

Starring: Ruth Gordon, Bud Cort, Vivian Pickles, Charles Tyner and Ellen Greer, among others.

Possibly the most disarming film introduction ever.

Harold is a young, rich 19 year old obsessed with death. His mother has started to get bored with his constant fake-suicides and thinks he ought to get married or join the military. Instead, Harold enjoys himself with visiting funerals, and it is at such an occasion his life changes when he meets Maude, a lively and spontaneous woman sixty years his major. Harold and Maude show to be the opposites that are drawn to each other.

Maude is an eccentric woman, who lives her life as a free soul who refuses to give in to society's ideas of an organized life (like getting a drivers license, don't steal people's cars etc etc). Harold and Maude take picnics at junk yards, visit graveyards and philosophize about life in general. They grow more and more fond of each other, until their relationship take a turn to romance.

Add to this sweet music by Cat Stevens (à la Simon and Garfunkel to The Graduate, 1967).

I must admit that I totally love Bud Cort's Harold. Anyone who has been an attention seeking, confused and depressed teenager with a death fascination can see themselves as Harold. The teenage problems are of course depicted in the most weird and extreme way possible, but that is after all just what it feels like.

There's one scene in particular that explains Harold's actions. (See below.) He sits on the floor with Maude, smoking a hookah and small talking. Suddenly Harold tells Maude about the first time he "died", and the attention he got from his mother that time. I'm fascinated by Maude's speech in this scene. "They aren't really dead, they are just pulling back from life."

Scene: A great piece of dialog between Harold and Maude.

Scene: I was surprised to hear Tchaikovsky's Piano Concert #1, it makes my heart go in pieces. It's so beautiful (and rather bizarre in the context). I hope I'm not the only one to think about Mary Astor in The Great Lie (1941)!

Harold and Maude became enormously popular among young audiences, who easily could identify with the character of Harold and liked the do-what-thou-wilt-attitude of Maude. The main focus of the film is as 1970's as it can become - don't care about what others think, do what you want. It sounds really corny when spelling it out like this, but the message is not overdramatised in the film - it rather just pushes you in the direction to draw that conclusion yourself.

The film played or a total of 1,957 showings at the Westgate Theatre in Edina, Minnesota, from mid- 1972 until June 1974. Ruth Gordon showed up for the first anniversary, and for the second one both she and Bud Cort appeared.

In short, Harold and Maude is an unusual film about life. It manages to combine different elements like charm, morbidity, love, humor and drama. I even found the film frightening in parts in its frankness.

I read a review someplace about this movie, and that person said that he almost was more amazed of what the film didn't include, than what it did. That's an opinion I am willing to share - take for instance the brief moment we see a number tattooed on Maude's wrist. It is never mentioned again, but you don't forget it. Instead of the film giving us a story about the number's origin (from prison? a concentration camp?), we have to guess ourselves why Maude became the person she is today, and what possibly could lie in her past that shaped her that way.

And that's brilliant, in my opinion. The film isn't about Maude's past, it isn't about anyone's past. It rather tells us to carpe diem - and if we want to dig in the past, that's something we have to do on our own and by our own initiative.

There's just one thing I still wonder about. In the original novel it is supposed to be very clear that Harold's "suicides" are faked by himself - but I can't really feel certain that it's supposed to be like that in the film version. How can he hang in the rope without suffocating? How can he lie that long, upside down, in the water without drowning for real?
I don't have a better explanation, I'm sad to say. But I can't get away from the feeling that he fantasizes those episodes, rather drifting away in his fantasy at how his mother would react is he "died again". (See the hookah clip above.)
I don't know, but the "faking it" theory seems too convenient for me...

British movie poster.

Enough about Harold and Maude - I bet we all want to know how Ruth Gordon looked when she was young! She was cool as heck.

By the way: Did you know that she and her husband Garson Kanin together wrote film scripts, among them Adam's Rib (1949)?

I also want to look like the Monopoly guy!

Here she looks just like a princess.