HAROLD AND MAUDE

Harold and Maude is a dark comedy that has become a cult classic for good reason. It’s smart, extremely well-acted, and laugh-out-loud funny. Though it was a failure at the box office when it was released in 1971, this film has gone on to gain much-deserved acclaim and recognition.

Harold (Bud Cort) is a young man of wealth, obsessed with suicide and death. He spends enormous amounts of energy on staging suicide attempts, much to the exasperation of his mother, Mrs. Chasen (played to detached perfection by Vivian Pickles). Her typical response when finding Harold hanging from a ceiling or cut up on a closet floor is merely one of annoyance. A scene where she engages in a morning swim (accompanied by Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto #1) as she nonchalantly completes laps around Harold’s “drowned” body is hysterical. Most of her time in the film is spent as the conduit for arranging possible dates for Harold, something she thinks will assist him in life. Harold turns each of her perspective date interviews into a spectacle of antics.

When Harold isn’t planning or staging ways to play out his demise, he likes to spend time attending funerals. It is at one of these funerals that he meets Maude (Ruth Gordan), an eccentric 79-year-old woman who lives life on her own terms, with little care for standard social boundaries or regulations. She believes that one should experience something new every day, and she’s more than willing to bend the rules of social norms to achieve that goal. Her joie de vivre is one that Harold is unaccustomed to and something that excites and invigorates him. The two begin to spend more and more time together until their friendship eventually becomes emotionally and physically romantic. Neither cares that their relationship will be considered taboo by most others.

Maude ultimately determines that embracing life for all it has to offer must also include accepting the inevitability of death as well. Unfolding events force Harold to finally choose if he wants to fully embrace the death he has grown up obsessing over or to embrace the life that Maude has unveiled to him.

At its core, the film is one of presenting contrasts… life and death; young and old; fullness and emptiness; color (Maude’s deserted train car home) and dull (Harold’s mansion home); simplicity and complexity (a daisy or a field of daisies). The cinematography, set in and around the San Francisco area is gorgeous, and the music and costuming firmly cement the film to the nineteen-seventies. Most of the film features original songs written and performed by Cat Stevens. Watching Harold and Maude was like enjoying a little time capsule of celluloid, intended to simply remind any viewer that life is precious, fleeting, and what one chooses to make of it. It may have been produced ahead of its time, but it has more than caught up… or we have.