Disc Reviews

Harold And Maude Blu-ray Review

• 20th Jul 2014

There are some films that were cult films from the moment they were released; there are others that can take many years before they fall into the cult club. Harold and Maude falls into both camps. The second film for eccentric director Hal Ashby, Harold and Maude is a black comedy, a unique and original film of this there is no denying. I first viewed the film as a 15-year-old and it certainly made a strong impression on me. Of course the clothes and look of the film are now very old fashioned and 70s but the film had not lost its power. As critic and lecturer David Cairns says in his talk about the film on the extras, the film never fails to captivate and even revolt his students.

Harold and Maude opens with privileged but lonely and disturbed 20-year-old rich kid Harold performing a ritualistic process as he plays a record (by Cat Stevens) and lights candles before he goes to hang himself. His mother (played by British actress Vivian Pickles) walks in nonchalantly and pretends to ignore her son hanging from a rope and tells him to stop being so silly. After initially continuing to dangle at the end of a rope Harold gets down. This is clearly a boy desperate for his mother’s attention and she obviously does not understand her son. We get the impression that Harold is a maudlin and strange young man. He is played by Bud Cort, who’s second starring role this was after starring in the equally, if not even more bizarre Brewster McCloud made the previous year in 1970 (even though Cairns states that Harold and Maude was his first starring role and fails to mention this curio film about a boy living in the gods of the Houston Astrodome dreaming of being able to fly like a bird). It is hard to imagine any other actor who could play the role of Harold so perfectly and gives a nuance of the bizarre. Harold’s hobbies are visiting cemeteries and admits to feigning suicide over 50 times. Exasperated his mother checks him in with a psychiatrist, signs him up to a computer dating company and tries to persuade his uncle to fast track him into the army. A couple of good looking young ladies are vetted by his mother and gives a gentle introduction to her wayward son Harold again feigns suicide in front of them including dousing himself in petrol and setting himself on fire, using a fake arm he pretends to lop it off with a meat cleaver and taking the death scene from Romeo and Juliet to a new level.

Life does change for Harold, however, when he visits a funeral for fun and runs into the almost 80-year-old live loving and affirming Maude. A friendship and kinship develops between the two with Maude stealing cars, motorbikes and racing them getting into all sorts of trouble, something that Harold becomes fascinated by. What shocks many first time viewers is that a beautiful relationship also develops into a physical one; Harold waking up with Maude sleeping next to her has a satisfied look on his face blowing bubbles.

This is also something of a zeitgeist film with Harold avoiding the draft and more than a few appointed asides at the military, the draft and US involvement in the Vietnam War. After films such as Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970) there were a spate of black comedies of the likes rarely seen or written today. Played to a wonderful soundtrack by Cat Stevens, the music is in sync with the age and the film. Ashby, a former film editor was approached by the young Paramount wunderkind chairman Robert Evans to film Harold and Maude from Colin Higgins’ script and obliged. Stills of Ashby show him as a long grey-haired and bearded hippy freak yet he would go on to make some of the iconic films of the 1970s including The Last Detail (1973) with Jack Nicholson, the ever popular Shampoo (1974) starring Warren Beatty and the last great performance from Peter Sellers in Being There (1979). As this is part of the Eureka! Masters of Cinema series then it is little surprise that the focus is directed to Ashby in Cairn’s discussion of the film. In the usually expected and wonderful booklet accompanying the disc are interviews (all from the 70s) with Ashby, Higgins and a humorous semi-confrontational one with Ruth Gordon who plays Maude who made her career as an actress a household name well into her seventies. It is good to see that this film gets the attention it fully deserves.

Chris Hick