When I first saw Harold and Maude - somewhere during the middle of college - I was struck by the bittersweet sexual shock of it all. Harold’s morbid play at suicide at the opening of the film (with many more to follow), and the sour look on his face when his mother, indifferent as stone, shrugs it off and then reminds him of another dinner and another dinner guest that night; then, of course, the ensuing highly unorthodox relationship which Harold becomes uncharacteristically passionate about. Passion is something that has been unknown to him until now. Living in sprawling opulence with cars given to him like candy to a baby, if Harold must bear his mother’s constant demeaning flabbergasting, why not embark on the ultimate reign of terror on her - a girlfriend 6 decades his senior.
Our two main characters' common link and first intersection is at a funeral because, oddly enough, they both happen to be funeral crashers. This is a dark yet quaint coincidence, given Harold's fascination with death and Maude's indiscriminate embrace of all natural things and occurrences. But Maude is especially full of life, and that's how their relationship flowers.
Bud Cort’s Harold does an effective near-depressive fatherless 20 year old (the lacking father is not explained), lurking and brooding in some scenes but captivatingly alive in others. But Maude, played by Ruth Gordon (Rosemary’s Baby), is a breath of fresh air in every scene, especially considering the post-countercultural climate of the film’s 1971 release, while predecessors like Medium Cool and Easy Rider more overtly resembled societal and political change. Maude’s character generates a very non-conformist and free-spirited way of life here, liberating the movie beyond the idea of a platform or a method of finger-pointing, and elevates it into something altogether unseen and refreshingly non-hippiedelic. Harold and Maude make Harold and Maude a flower of another color.
Maude is a fearless pip, emboldened by what seems to be an infinite love of life and the living. At times she brings the movie even more off it's rocker, to a near absurdist level of comedy, such as in the great chase scene with a much younger Tom Skerritt as a flummoxed motorcycle cop. She also owns a comically large sculpture of a vagina, which in one scene makes for an apt bit of foreshadowing in this transcendent fable-like story.
I can’t say for sure what I noticed about the film 11 years ago, but now so much more is clear. The film deals with self identity and acceptance in the face of social norms. Harold is at one end of the spectrum while his mother (played by Vivian Pickles) - who at that same dinner speaks of his absent father in a story about about the French river “Sane”, as she pronounces it - is at the other, and farther still is Maude. Harold’s mother thinks like many conservative and practical mothers of the time and her idea is to sack him with the military uncle (a one-armed caricature straight out of Clockwork Orange, although both films were released the same year), whom Harold scares the hell out of in perhaps the film's most brilliant scene, in which Harold runs off Maude's pretend peace-loving solo picketer into a hole that goes into the ocean below.
Harold and Maude ambles along to the wistful strains of Cat Stevens’ jangles, which collectively amount to a great score. The standout track however, “If you want to be free, be free, if you want to sing out sing out”, has a humorous and motherly matter-of-factness that is nearly over the top, but it tenderizes the emotional gravity and delicacy of the bond formed between these two oddballs.
Ashby handles this movie and the characters generously - much as he did with The Landlord, another film tackling misfit-vs-the-world ideas, letting his actors inhabit their characters in a way that only a person as in touch with their milieu as this director could. There is a comfortable looseness in the way the characters meet and then daringly take on adventures and get to know each other in all ways.
Maude shows Harold the world. She shows him how to live, which he admits he hasn’t done ("I've died a few times") and in the tragic end, who would know that Maude would set Harold up for the biggest, most ironic disappointment of his life. And by his first love, no less. Harold and Maude is a love story about finding one’s sense of self. It’s a story about the soul, and furthermore a story with a soul. I’d like to call it a spirit film, because it has to be seen to be believed.
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