Criterion Corner: Harold and Maude (1971) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Paramount Pictures

The second feature film of former The Loved One and In the Heat of the Night film editor Hal Ashby took decades to finally find an audience after a tepid critical and commercial response.  Entitled Harold and Maude, a screwball black comedy about a young troublemaking man who develops a friendship and eventual romantic relationship with an elderly woman, the snarky laugh riot initially fell on deaf ears.  Released in an already tumultuous if not violent year of film spearheaded by A Clockwork Orange, The Devils and Straw Dogs, Ashby’s film offered something of a tragicomic antidote to the havoc wrought by those films.  Though Ashby would achieve critical and commercial success two years later with the Jack Nicholson starring Naval Prison drama The Last Detail, it is Harold and Maude which many refer to as the director’s quintessential work.

 
Young Harold Chasen (Bud Cort) lives a privileged yet unhappy life under the guise of his emotionally withdrawn mother (Vivian Pickles) and whiles away his time staging fake suicides to spite her.  Whether it involves hanging or drowning or setting himself on fire, she’s used to it but nevertheless sends him to a psychoanalyst, prepares blind dates for him and even buys him an expensive car all of which he promptly makes a grim joke out of.  One day, he meets 79-year-old Maude (Ruth Gordon from Rosemary’s Baby) and the two hit it off playing practical jokes together.  Unlike him, she’s impoverished in a decommissioned railroad car but couldn’t be happier with life and all of its curiosities.  As time goes on, the previously shielded up Harold starts opening up to her and an unlikely romance with a massive age difference begins to blossom between them.

 
Full of many strange fake-outs with the protagonist seeming to kill himself repeatedly on camera, a quirky sense of humor and finally a street-smart dose of wisdom including but not limited to allusions to Maude’s past as a Holocaust survivor, Harold and Maude starts out kind of nebulous in intent before its real aims gradually come into focus.  With lush scenic cinematography by eventual Chinatown and Scarface cameraman John A. Alonzo and a haunted but ultimately uplifting series of songs by Cat Stevens, the look and sound of Hal Ashby’s epic has the unique characteristic with starting out dim and grim inside the depressing wealthy home life before things brighten up in the poor elderly woman’s home.  It’s as though Harold’s world becomes brighter with the course of the film.  It goes without saying this film would not work without the crucial casting of Bud Cort as the mischievous depressed Harold and the spunky cool attitude of Ruth Gordon who previously won an Oscar for her role as the nosey witch neighbor in Rosemary’s Baby.  Despite the age difference which is intentional and key to the film’s quirky romance, the chemistry these two share onscreen is palpable if not one of the most stirring screen romances in living memory.

 
Originally opening the scathing reviews and little to no box office returns at the time, the otherwise low-budget Harold and Maude was all but savaged upon initial release.  It wasn’t until 1983 that tide started to turn and eventually critics reappraised the film with the Writer’s Guild of America naming it number 86 in the 101 Greatest Screenplays ever written.  Sight and Sound furthered this when they named it one of the Greatest Films of All Time and eventually the film wound up being preserved by the Library of Congress before making it on the American Film Institute’s list of 100 Years…100 Laughs.  The soundtrack album by pop artist and musician Cat Stevens is synonymous with the film and became something of a minor hit itself.  Eventually there were even stage play and musical theater adaptations of the saga of Harold and Maude.

 
Seen years later, it seems far ahead of its time of inception despite coming out in perhaps the freest year Hollywood had ever seen.  Eventually canonized by The Criterion Collection in 2012 including a collection of audio excerpts of the late Hal Ashby speaking on the film, Harold and Maude remains one of the most timelessly funny films in the history of American cinema and further cemented Ashby for all intents and purposes as one of the all-time great comedy filmmakers.  Eventually going on to direct Shampoo and the Academy Award winning Being There, Ashby’s career peaked and then petered out in the 1980s following a tragic demise but for those keen on getting into his work in general everyone seems to start with Harold and Maude, a film as hilarious as it is heartfelt.

--Andrew Kotwicki