Review: Harold and Maude

Director: Hal Ashby
Cast: Ruth Gordon, Bud Cort, Vivian Pickles
Length: 91mins
Country: USA

What happens when a peculiar young man with an imaginative obsession with death meets vivacious old woman with a passion for life? You get Hal Ashby’s much celebrated 1972 classic Harold and Maude. Recently released on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK by Masters of Cinema, this re-release is embellished with all new stereo sound making the soundtrack a whole load snazzier, but don’t worry purists, with a click of a button the original LPCM 2.0 Mono is still available. But one thing remains no matter the release; this is a romantic-comedy that proves to both returning fans and first time watchers that this love story is not quite like any other you’ve seen before.

The animated poster for Harold and Maude.

Even though the defining moment of romance between Harold and Maude may not shock audiences today like it did back at the time of film’s original release, the absurd dark comedy and beautiful flowing friendship have aged gracefully. Hal Ashby has the courage as a director to intersect an innocent but unconventional comradeship between a boy and lady, with some gruesome images of suicide while playing it all for laughs. A lot of dark comedies work in more subtle ways by building the funny from a unanimous aura of death in its scene setting while others pump the hilarity by making us laugh directly at the face of death, but not many tread the fine line of combining both quite like this film.

Harold and Maude is of course as much of a coming of age story as it is a romantic one. Harold is still struggling to come to terms with adulthood, eternally stuck in his violent but childish games. Neglected by his stern and oblivious mother (played exuberantly by Vivian Pickels), Harold exhibits a peculiar kind of existential crises that sticks out like the worst kind of cry for help. With Harold as his prime example, Ashby wryly criticizes the alienation of youth in growing society, brilliantly lampooning constructs like impending marriage and the military. But most importantly, by turning the main archetypes on their head and giving Maude the youthful charisma and charm of a leading man, he jolts scenes of typical Hollywood branding: opposing the authorities, heavy bouts of flirting, motor biking like there’s no tomorrow, with an added sense of bizarre and hilarious.

A lot of dark comedies work in more subtle ways by building the funny from a unanimous aura of death in its scene setting while others pump the hilarity by making us laugh directly at the face of death, but not many tread the fine line of combining both quite like this film.

By turning the main archetypes on their head and giving Maude the youthful charisma and charm of a leading man, he jolts scenes of typical Hollywood branding: opposing the authorities, heavy bouts of flirting, motor biking like there’s no tomorrow, with an added sense of bizarre and hilarious.

Of course Cat Stevens’ (now Yusuf Islam) soundtrack deserves as much praise as the film itself.  Two songs, ‘Don’t Be Shy’ and ‘If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out,’ were composed specifically for the movie while others come straight from his best-selling albums like ‘Tea for the Tillerman’. There is a real cheekiness in scoring much of the film’s post-funeral transition scenes with Stevens’ signature folk pop/rock. It really helps lift our spirits and as it is used unsparingly throughout the film it doubles as Harold and Maude’s personal mix tape.

Harold and Maude was the beginning of a fantastic road for Hal Ashby, in which he cemented himself as one of the best directors of the ‘70s. The film’s cult success comes due to the culmination of a no less than pitch perfect performances from its minimal cast and a script that showed the weird to be wonderful. Given Ruth Gordon’s show-stopping career as a critically acclaimed screenwriter, playwright, actor and Broadway star it’s not difficult to see how she could inhabit the role of the full-of-life Maude so naturally. Unfortunately for Bud Cort, for which this film was one of his first big breaks, his endearing portrayal of Harold only lead him to being typecast as strange and morose characters.

This film will continue to sit (as the weirdo at the back) in the pantheon of great romantic comedies. Its impression on future filmmakers like Wes Anderson is clear but Harold and Maude is more than just the first big coming of the indie-quirk oeuvre. Maude is such a fully realised leading lady that her age occasionally becomes an afterthought as we’re just caught up in whatever life-fulfilling and rebellious act she’s going to do next. Ashby truly manages to bring the perfect balance of weird, delightful and lyrically poignant. And perhaps it even brings some hope that our very own Maude is out there to guide us out of the dark.

Header Image Source, Image 1, Image 2

Watch ‘Haroldand Maude’ at Zavvi.