February 2005

Harold and Maude

• Starring: Bud Cort, Ruth Gordon, Vivian Pickles, Cyril Cusack, Charles Tyner
• Directed by: Hal Ashby
• Theatrical release: 1971
• DVD release: 2000
• Video: Widescreen (anamorphic)
• Sound: Dolby Digital mono
• Released by: Paramount

With Valentine’s Day coming up, I wanted to write about a sweet romance, something a loving couple might enjoy snuggling to on a cold evening. I thought about some recent releases, such as Hua Yang Nian Hua or Moulin Rouge, but we’ve already covered those -- and besides, this column is devoted to classics. No, what I was looking for was masterwork so good it belongs in every serious film collection. As I went through my groaning collection of love stories, I came across a good subversive romance, a cult favorite with a big black streak running through its thousand laughs.

Harold and Maude is the story of two gentle souls -- a young man, Harold (Bud Cort), who lives with his mother (Vivian Pickles) merely to torment her with a series of faked suicides, and a 79-year-old woman, Maude (Ruth Gordon), who steals cars for fun. Each has a fascination with death that includes attending the funerals of strangers. They meet at one of these and begin to develop their strange attraction for each other. If this comedy has dark overtones, it also has everything a classic romantic comedy should have: two quirky characters we immediately fall in love with, a little bit of danger, heaps of hilarious jokes, and the slow budding of a relationship into a love affair with a mountainous roadblock in the way of its heartwarming fruition. I envy you if you’ve never seen Harold and Maude’s many sweet surprises and sidesplitting sight gags. I don’t want to give away a single one.

Harold and Maude was the second film directed by the visionary Hal Ashby. That Ashby ended up a director at all is a miracle. His parents divorced, his father killed himself, and by the time he was 19 Ashby himself had dropped out of high school, married, and divorced. He moved to L.A., where he got a job pulling a printing press at Universal Studios. In the meantime, director William Wyler (The Best Years of Our Lives) offered Ashby work as an assistant to a film editor, which allowed him to demonstrate some creativity. Director Norman Jewison fell in love with Ashby’s editing, began using him for all of his films, and, ten years later, Ashby won an Oscar for his editing of Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967). Jewison, now on a roll, didn’t have time to direct his next scheduled film, The Landlord (1970), and offered Ashby the job. The film ended up making money and drawing praise from critics for its evenhandedness in dealing with the difficult subject of race relations. Ashby spent the rest of the decade making great films -- Harold and Maude (1971), The Last Detail (1973), Shampoo (1975), Bound for Glory (1976), Coming Home (1978), Being There (1979) -- all of which had one thing in common: a deep affection for seriously wacko characters.

In lesser hands, it would be easy for this film’s characters to slide down into a muddle of histrionic (Harold) and antisocial (Maude) personality disorders. Harold’s constant manipulation of his mother and the poor potential love interests she parades before him would be spine-tingling if they weren’t so hilarious. Similarly, Maude’s minor mayhems and felonies seem sweet coming from a 79-year-old. Only 20 minutes into the film, Ashby has already turned the world upside down -- the folks who would normally be considered weird are the ones we care about, while the "normal" folks have become symbols of society’s ills. Ashby accomplishes this with wicked visual tricks and the rhythms of a topnotch editor. For example, whenever he’s seeing his psychiatrist, Harold’s clothes are identical to his doctor’s, a subtle but perfect histrionic touch. Or watch 30 minutes into the film at the unhurried way Ashby allows Harold to reveal his devilish intentions to the audience after he scares off a potential girlfriend. Ashby slowly builds to the film’s climax, where he edits together sights and sounds at the 1:24:55 mark into a one-second montage that is one of the most chilling moments in film. If Harold’s single word doesn’t send a shiver down your spine, you need a red-blood-cell transfusion.

Bud Cort made Harold plausible -- no easy task, given the character’s predilections. His sense of irony -- I love the opening scene, in which he uses a lighter to light a match -- and his doe-eyed, flat affect build to such a sweet, affable crescendo that the ending is perfectly plausible. Harold made Bud Cort famous, but it cost him a career. After Harold and Maude, the only roles he was offered were weirdos; he never again got a starring role.

Ruth Gordon made being old sexy, and she did it the old-fashioned way -- by using her brain. A veteran of the Algonquin Round Table, Gordon was used to tossing off witticisms with the likes of Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley. She and her husband, Garson Kanin, had written some of the best comedies for Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy by basing the scripts on their own marriage. By the time Gordon made Harold and Maude she was 75, and knew how to crisscross a red-blooded libertine with an empathetic nurturer and bring life to her character without ever overplaying it. Who else could have gotten away with all the blatant sociopathy and still looked so cute?

The third important character in Harold and Maude is a sort of Greek chorus -- in this case, the music of Cat Stevens. Throughout the film, Stevens’s music makes just the right comment on the action -- sometimes clarifying, sometimes ironic, always wistful.

Harold and Maude was not popular when it was first released, in 1971. Variety wrote, "Harold and Maude has all the fun and gaiety of a burning orphanage . . . . One thing that can be said about Ashby -- he began the film in a gross and macabre manner, and never once deviates from the concept." Vincent Canby wrote, in the New York Times, "As Harold and Maude, Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon are supposed to appear magnificently mismatched for the purposes of the comedy. They are mismatched, at least visually. Mr. Cort’s baby face and teen-age build look grotesque alongside Miss Gordon’s tiny, weazened frame. Yet, as performers, they both are so aggressive, so creepy and off-putting, that Harold and Maude are obviously made for each other, a point the movie itself refuses to recognize . . . ." Despite being produced for less than $1.5 million, Harold and Maude never made much money.

Then the college crowd discovered it. Harold and Maude became a hit on the cult movie circuit and, on VHS and LD, went on to make a small fortune for its producers. Given that, you’d think they’d have wanted to give the film better treatment for its DVD release. Instead, Paramount has given us a dirty print indifferently mastered, with poor resolution of the film’s dark palette. The only extras are a couple of trailers. At least the price is right: it sells most places for under $12. Still, I can only wish that the Criterion Collection would get the rights for Harold and Maude and do the film justice. Several of the cast and crew are still alive and active and could probably tell some great stories.

Like Bud Cort. In a bizarre twist of fate, right after making Harold and Maude, he became close friends with Groucho Marx and lived with the older man until his death in 1977. Then, in 1979, Cort was in a terrible car accident that left him disfigured, requiring years of painful plastic surgery, depleting his net worth and killing any hopes he had of maintaining a career. To this day, he hasn’t been able to create much interest. Nor did Harold and Maude make him rich. The film was made before actors had any ideas about contracting for residuals for their films’ release on VHS, let alone DVD. Cort earns about $100 a year for having played Harold.

An even stranger story is that of Cat Stevens. While swimming off Malibu in 1976, Stevens nearly drowned. He prayed to God, offering his services if God would save him. He was then washed to shore by a gentle wave. The next year, Stevens converted to Islam, changed his name to Yusuf Islam, and turned his back on the rock world (except for the royalties). His name popped up a few years later when he supposedly called for the death of Salman Rushdie, though he denies he ever said any such thing. Nonetheless, protesters burned his records and tapes, and Cat Stevens became the punch line of too many jokes. His reputation took another hit in 2004, when his name appeared on a list of potential terrorists and he was forcibly removed from an American plane and sent back to the UK. Islam is currently mounting a PR campaign to restore his good name.

Cort’s and Stevens’s stories are beamingly positive compared to Hal Ashby’s. Check chapter 23 of Harold and Maude, the carnival scene. The bearded, longhaired guy with the vacant look is Hal Ashby. As long as he reliably churned out profitable hits, Hollywood producers were willing to back him. But as Ashby grew more successful, his life became a snake pit of drugs, and he became less and less dependable. His last really good film, Being There, was made in 1979. He died in 1988 from a rapidly spreading cancer.

Now, none of it matters, because in 1971, everyone involved found a way to put 91 minutes of movie magic on celluloid. Watch it with someone you love -- preferably, someone with a dark sense of humor.

...Wes Marshall
wesm@hometheatersound.com

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