Harold And Maude
A DISAPPOINTING, PREDICTABLE sort of outrage greeted Harold And Maude when it first reached cinemas in the winter of 1971. The peculiar yet enduring love story between a 20ish-year-old man and his 79-year-old girlfriend tanked financially, while critics not only brayed at the subject matter but dismissed its unbridled, vivacious approach to life entirely. “Harold And
Maude has all the fun and gaiety of a burning orphanage,” read the Variety review upon release.
And yet, like the sickly tree that Maude wrenches from a city sidewalk and rehomes in forest soil, this giddy rumination on life through death found a new life of its own. After a second theatrical release in 1972 (from when it went on to play for 105 consecutive weeks at Minneapolis’ Westgate Theater), Harold And Maude crawled into college dorms and cult cinemas, and subsequently the hearts of the romantic and the marginalised, with its galvanising messages of love and liberation. In 1983, it finally turned a profit on its paltry $1.2 million budget, and today its macabre wit and inventive cinematography can be seen echoed in the films of Wes Anderson, Cameron Crowe and Alexander Payne.
Harold And Maude may have endured a patchy relationship with the film industry, yet its journey to production couldn’t be more Hollywood if it tried. Originally a 20-minute script written by Colin Higgins as his master thesis, the UCLA student got lucky while working as a pool boy for Spartacus producer Edward Lewis. He chanced passing the script onto Lewis’ wife Mildred and it paid off, and soon enough this optimistic story about the morbid scion of a wealthy family and a Holocaust survivor landed in the lap of Paramount Pictures bigwig Stanley Jaffe.
Since the story’s conception in the late 1960s, the mainstream appeal of the bohemian movement, with its political marches and free love, had dulled, but in its wake, big studios had loosened up and become open to working with more non-commercial filmmakers and creatives. Enter Hal Ashby, the pot-smoking, bearded editor of landmark films of the 1960s like The Thomas Crown Affair and The Cincinnati Kid, and whose debut film as director, The Landlord, was a satire on gentrification that, like Harold And Maude, saw a similarly privileged young male protagonist (a floppy-haired Beau Bridges) rebuff his life of inherited normalcy.
Yet friction between Ashby, Higgins and a profit-hungry studio was inevitable, and multiple spats ensued. Ashby, a director not accustomed to compromise, nearly left the project a month before shooting began after a string of creative differences. Higgins suffered a professional blow when, after assuming that he was entering the project as director, he was told his test footage wasn’t strong enough.
Ashby accepted the job on the condition that he could keep Higgins on set to learn the ropes, and gave the rising writer a producer credit for
his work. Similar camaraderie would be found in post-production, when Paramount — now unhappy with the seemingly indecent nature of Harold and Maude’s relationship — took control of the edit away from Ashby. It was only when lead actor Bud Cort threatened to abandon his publicity duties that Ashby would retrieve his power over the final cut, bar a kissing scene that Paramount head Robert Evans hated (Ashby sneaked it into a trailer nonetheless). Ali Macgraw — Evans’ wife at the time — wanted the scene involving Harold and Maude in bed together to be axed completely.
By the standards of the early 1970s, Harold And Maude was admittedly a shocking film, with the couple’s slow, unfurling romance culminating in a single shot of them sprawled out peacefully after spending the night together. Shortly after, when Harold confesses his love for Maude to his opulent yet unhinged mother (Vivian Pickles), a barrage of outrage from his militarygeneral uncle, shrink and priest ensues. It was as if Ashby had seen the public’s wrath in a crystal ball and decided to have a little fun at their expense.
Then the dust settled, the film enjoyed its renaissance, and the true nature of Harold and Maude’s relationship shone through: a celebration of love, unhurried and unapologetic in its nature, with the ability to quite literally overpower death. When we meet Harold he’s staging theatrical fake suicides in his stately family home, feeling he’d be of more worth dead than alive. When we leave, he’s singing a Cat Stevens song, looking forward to a life of his own making.
In Maude, Harold finds his saviour, an untethered spirit who, in the days leading up to her 80th birthday, remains loyal to living a full, fascinating life. “You sure have a way with people,” Harold observes. “Well, they’re my species!” comes the jovial reply. In today’s shorthand it would be easy to label Maude the blueprint for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl — a female character brimming with joie de vivre and whimsy who vastly enhances the life of our male lead.
But Maude belongs to nobody, not even Harold, choosing to play out to the beat of her own drum instead of a life of matrimony. Even in her final moments, she shows Harold that there’s no shame in forging your own path, that you can upend society not by hanging by the neck from an ornate ceiling (no matter how wickedly funny it is to behold), but by being your most authentic self.
Harold And Maude doesn’t quite take a torch to the American flag like Easy Rider, The Graduate or other anti-conformist offerings from the era. Instead it exudes a quiet rebellion that transcends class and age, and a trailblazing aesthetic, with its French New Wave-style editing and sumptuous photography from Scarface cinematographer John Alonzo, who transforms the Bay Area into a private, ethereal dreamscape for the pair. In his custom-written anthem, ‘If You Want To Sing Out, Sing Out’, Cat Stevens sings energetically about selfempowerment: “If you want to be free, be free…”
It was this pioneering, stubborn approach to making Harold And Maude that made the love between these two outcasts all the more resilient. This was a film that carved out a rhythm all of its own. It just took the world a little while to keep pace with the beat.
HAROLD AND MAUDE IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD