Harold and Maude (1971)

I always heard about Harold and Maude. The movie seemed to be the exact opposite of anything I'd care to watch. That weird-ass Bud Cort kid in a relationship with...Ruth Gordon? With Cat Stevens songs on the soundtrack? Uh, no.

But then I'd hear things about Harold and Maude. It's a dark comedy. It's really good. It's the kind of movie I would like.

I resisted. A hard head can be a powerful roadblock.

I recently listened to the audiobook of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. It's a fascinating book about the New Hollywood period of great movies from the late sixties to the mid seventies. One of the most interesting figures in the book is director Hal Ashby. Ashby is revered by many for his iconoclastic films, his refusal to bow to corporate interference, and his skill as a director and editor of motion pictures.

I'd seen The Last Detail, Bound For Glory, and Being There. All three are stunning films. Ashby is known for directing Warren Beatty in Shampoo, which is another movie I always felt I would despise. There's Coming Home, which I have never seen, and of course Harold and Maude.

The more I heard about Harold and Maude over the years, the more I came to realize that I would have to watch it. Eventually.

We've all seen movies with the older man and the young woman getting together. Sixty-five year old Harrison Ford carrying on with a woman decades his junior. Woody Allen and Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan. But a very young man and a seventy-nine year old woman?

According to Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, the reactions from the studio execs about Harold and Maude was basically, "Is he out of his fucking mind?" That kind of a relationship, especially with creepy Bud Cort, is just bizarre.

Well, I've always had a taste for the bizarre. The time had come for Harold and Maude.

Guess what? I really liked it. Harold and Maude is a very dark, very funny, and extremely uncomfortable story of a rich kid thoroughly obsessed with death. He acts out his suicidal fantasies to freak out his blue-nosed mother. Like the pranks of Chainsaw and Dave from Summer School, but a lot more disturbing.

Harold likes to hang out at funerals. Any funerals. He meets an eccentric old woman at one, and the two develop an odd friendship.

Maude is what used to be called a free spirit. She likes to laugh, to break rules, and live on the edge. Maude has a few secrets, though.

Harold and Maude discover in each other the missing parts of their own lives. It's an often funny, sometimes sad journey in which they find genuine love for one another.

Don't expect too much of a happy ending. It becomes increasingly obvious that tragedy awaits the eccentric couple.

The photography is often stunning, and both Cort and Gordon are amazing. I laughed aloud a few times, and I cringed here and there. Ultimately Harold and Maude gave me things to think about. Can you ask more from a piece of film, a book, or a song?

Harold and Maude is refreshingly non-commercial. It could never be made today. Well, at least with the backing of a major studio. You should give it a try.

Now I guess I have to consider watching Shampoo. Over the years I saw footage of Warren Beatty with what looks like a shock wig on his head, running around chasing women. It looked to me like a fatuous sex farce, but now I understand it's more of a satire. Hal Ashby did not make trivial movies during his heyday in the 1970s. Later, in the '80s, as his career was in sharp decline, Ashby made some silly pictures, but he was at his peak when he directed Shampoo.

Written by Mark Sieber