Movies - Harold and Maude

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	Movies - Harold and Maude

Harold and Maude is a cult movie directed in 1971 by Hal Ashby. The film features both dark and light humor, social satire (including anti-war), promotes the notion of living life to its fullest, and has long had a cult following. The film is number 45 on the American Film Institute's list of 100 Funniest Movies and in 1997, it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

The film was a commercial failure when it was released and critics were divided.

The screenplay upon which the film was based was written by Colin Higgins, and published as a novel in 1971. The movie was shot in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The movie has given two new words "harolding" (to hang around cemeteries) described by Douglas Coupland in "Harolding in West Vancouver" (1996) and "maudism" or "maudianism", the philosophy of living each day to the fullest..

Summary

The film first introduces us to Harold, an alienated 20 year-old young man from a wealthy family who lives in a large mansion with his dominating mother. Harold stages realistic mock-suicides. This has evidently been going on for so long that his mother takes no notice, other than when Harold causes a particular mess with his fake blood. For amusement, Harold attends funerals of people he doesn't know. At these he repeatedly sees Maude, a 79 year-old woman who befriends him. Maude is very much his opposite: a senior citizen, energetic, impulsive, and light-hearted. The two form an unlikely friendship, then romance. But on her birthday, Maude follows through with her plan to die at age 80 by taking pills. After much heart-ache, Harold decides to destroy the last peice of his former morose self by driving his custom Jaguar hearse off of a cliff. As the camera pans up, the audience sees a new, happier Harold walking towards the horizon playing his banjo.

Themes

Hal Ashby, the director of the film, was part of the San Francisco youth culture, and his film posits the doomed youth of the alienated against the vital age of the Holocaust survivors. (At one point, Harold and the audience quickly see blue numbers tattooed on Maude's arm.) While Harold is part of a society where he can have no importance and no meaning, Maude has survived against totalitarianism. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, Harold can only feel significant by dying. Maude, on the other hand, is a fictionalizer and a dreamer. She sees beauty where others see none, believes in the innate goodness of people (but not the State), and practices what she calls her own individual revolution. Her backstory is only hinted at in the film. She tells Harold at one point about Alfred Dreyfus seeing fantastic birds on Devil's Island and finding out later that they were only seagulls. She says that to her they would always be glorious birds.

Cast

Marjorie Chardin (Maude): Ruth Gordon
Harold Chasen: Bud Cort
Mrs. Chasen: Vivian Pickles
Glaucus: Cyril Cusack
Uncle Victor: Charles Tyner
Sunshine Doré: Ellen Geer
Priest: Eric Christmas
Psychiatrist: G. Wood
Candy Gulf: Judy Engles
Edith Phern: Shari Summers
Motorcycle Officer: Tom Skerritt
(as M. Borman)

Crew

Cinematography by: John Alonzo

Music

The soundtrack is by Cat Stevens, and includes two songs which he composed specifically for the movie and which were unavailable for several decades on vinyl or cassette (they were later released on the compact disc Footsteps in the Dark).

Trivia

Harold buys his Hearse from San Carlos Auto Wreckers.
Maude steals the Mustang in front of the San Mateo County Courthouse.
The expansive cemetery is the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, California.
Motorcycle police officer pulls Maude over on the Old Dumbarton Bridge causeway.

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