Harold and Maude

Harold Chasen is a young man obsessed with death. He stages elaborate shocking fake suicides, attends funerals, and drives a hearse, all to the chagrin of his cold, narcissistic, filthy-rich socialite mother.[5] His mother sets up appointments with a psychoanalyst for him, but the analyst is befuddled by the case and fails to get Harold to talk about his real emotions. Harold’s mother also sets him up with dates he does not want, buys him presents he hates and destroys, and answers career questionnaires for him based on her own preferences rather than his. Harold does not exist for her except as an extension of herself.

At another stranger's funeral service, Harold meets Maude, a seventy-nine-year-old woman who shares Harold's hobby of attending funerals. He is entranced by her quirky outlook on life, which is bright and excessively carefree in contrast with his morbidity. Maude lives in a decommissioned railroad car. She thinks nothing of breaking the law in any way she pleases, including “taking” other people’s cars, uprooting a tree from a public space to re-plant it, speeding, and parking on the city sidewalk. She and Harold form a bond and Maude shows Harold the pleasures of art and music (including how to play banjo), and teaches him how to make “the most of his time on earth.”[5] Meanwhile, Harold's mother is determined, against Harold's wishes, to find him a wife. One by one, Harold frightens and horrifies each of his appointed dates, by appearing to commit gruesome acts such as self-immolation, self-mutilation and seppuku. His mother tries enlisting him in the military by sending him to his uncle, who had served under General MacArthur in the Second World War and lost an arm, but Harold deters his recruiting-officer uncle by staging a scene in which Maude poses as a pacifist protester and Harold seemingly murders her out of militarist fanaticism.

When Harold and Maude talk at her home he tells her, without prompting, the motive for his fake suicides: when he was at boarding school, he accidentally caused an explosion in his chemistry lab, leading police to assume that he had been killed. Harold had returned home just in time to witness his mother react to the news of his death by faking a ludicrously dramatized fainting. As he reaches this part of the story, Harold bursts into tears and says, “I decided then I enjoyed being dead.”

As they become closer, their friendship blossoms into a romance. Holding her hand, Harold discovers a number tattooed on her forearm, meaning that Maude is a Jewish survivor of the German Nazi death camps. Harold announces that he will marry Maude, resulting in disgusted outbursts from his family, analyst, and priest. Unbeknownst to Harold, Maude is secretly planning to commit suicide on her eightieth birthday. Maude’s birthday arrives, and Harold throws a surprise party for her. As the couple dance, Maude tells Harold that she “couldn't imagine a lovelier farewell.” Confused, he questions Maude as to her meaning and she reveals that she has taken an overdose of sleeping pills and will be dead by midnight. She restates her firm belief that eighty is the proper age to die.

Harold rushes Maude to the hospital, where she is treated unsuccessfully and dies. In the final sequence, Harold’s car is seen going off a seaside cliff but after the crash, the final shot reveals Harold standing calmly atop the cliff, holding his banjo. After gazing down at the wreckage, he dances away, picking out on his banjo Cat Stevens’s song "If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out", which Maude had played and sung for him.

• Ruth Gordon as Dame Marjorie "Maude" Chardin, a 79-year-old free spirit. Maude believes in living each day to the full, and "trying something new every day". Her view of life is so joyful that, true to the film's motif, it crosses a blurred, shifting line into a carefree attitude toward death as well. We know little of her past, but learn that as a young woman she lived in pre-war Vienna, was once married and has a Nazi concentration camp tattoo on one arm.
• Bud Cort as Harold Parker Chasen, a young man who is obsessed with death. He drives a hearse, attends funerals of strangers and stages elaborate fake suicides. Through meeting and falling in love with Maude, he discovers joy in living for the first time.
• Vivian Pickles as Mrs. Chasen, Harold's opulently wealthy mother, is controlling, snooty and seemingly incapable of affection. Hoping to force him into respectability, Mrs. Chasen replaces Harold's beloved hearse with a Jaguar (which he then converts to a miniature hearse) and sets up several blind dates, or more accurately, "bride interviews" with young women.
• Cyril Cusack as Glaucus, the sculptor who makes an ice statue of Maude and lends them his tools to transport a tree.
• Charles Tyner as General Victor Ball, Harold's uncle who lost an arm in the war and now pulls a hidden cord to make his wire prosthetic "salute". At Mrs. Chasen's request, he attempts to prepare Harold to join the armed forces. The effort is thwarted by a planned stunt in which Harold appears to kill Maude.
• Eric Christmas as the Priest
• George Wood as Harold's psychiatrist
• Ellen Geer as Sunshine Doré, an actress, Harold's third blind date. She mimics his suicide, giving a histrionic rendition of Juliet's death scene.
• Judy Engles as Candy Gulf, Harold's first blind date, whom he scares off by apparently setting himself on fire.
• Shari Summers as Edith Phern, Harold's second blind date, whom he dissuades by pretending to cut off his hand.
• Tom Skerritt (credited as "M. Borman") as the Motorcycle Officer who stops Maude and Harold.[6]

Director Hal Ashby appears in an uncredited cameo, watching a model train at an amusement park. The amusement park is Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk (California USA) / Penny Arcade.

UCLA student Colin Higgins wrote Harold and Maude as his master's thesis. While working as producer Edward Lewis's pool boy, Higgins showed the script to Lewis's wife, Mildred. Mildred was so impressed that she got Edward to give it to Stanley Jaffe at Paramount. Higgins sold the script with the understanding that he would direct the film but he was told he wasn't ready, after tests he shot proved unsatisfactory to the studio heads. Ashby would only commit to directing the film after getting Higgins' blessing and then, so Higgins could watch and learn from him on the set, Ashby made Higgins a co-producer.[7] Higgins says he originally thought of the story as a play. It then became a 20-minute thesis while at film school. After the film came out, the script was turned into a novel then a play, which ran for several years in Paris.[8]

Ashby felt that Maude should ideally be European and his list of possible actresses included dames Peggy Ashcroft, Edith Evans, Gladys Cooper and Celia Johnson as well as Lotte Lenya, Luise Rainer, Pola Negri, Minta Durfee, and Agatha Christie.[9] Ruth Gordon indicated that in addition she heard that Edwige Feuillère, Elisabeth Bergner, Mildred Natwick, Mildred Dunnock, and Dorothy Stickney had been considered.[10]

For Harold, in addition to Bud Cort, Ashby considered all promising unknowns, Richard Dreyfuss, Bob Balaban, and John Savage. Also on his list were John Rubinstein, for whom Higgins had written the part, and then-up-and-coming British pop star Elton John, whom Ashby had seen live and hoped would also do the music.[11]

Anne Brebner, the casting director, was almost cast as Harold's mother, when Vivian Pickles was briefly unable to do the role.[12]

On June 12, 2012, The Criterion Collection released Harold and Maude for Region 1 on DVD and Blu-ray, both of which includes a collection of audio excerpts of director Hal Ashby from January 11, 1972 and of screenwriter Colin Higgins from January 10, 1979, a new video interview with Yusuf/Cat Stevens, a new audio commentary by Ashby biographer Nick Dawson and producer Charles B. Mulvehill, and a booklet which includes a new film essay by film and television critic Matt Zoller Seitz. Exclusive to the Blu-ray edition are a new digital restoration of the film with uncompressed monaural soundtrack and an optional remastered uncompressed stereo soundtrack. Other exclusives are a New York Times profile of actress Ruth Gordon from 1971, an interview from 1997 with actor Bud Cort and cinematographer John Alonzo, and an interview from 2001 with executive producer Mildred Lewis.[20][21][22]

Harold and Maude is #45 on the American Film Institute's list of 100 Years... 100 Laughs, the list of the top 100 films in American comedy. The list was released in 2000. Two years later, AFI released the list AFI's 100 Years... 100 Passions honoring the most romantic films for the past 100 years, Harold and Maude ranked #69.[23] In September 2008, Empire listed Harold and Maude as #65 in Empire's 500 Greatest Movies of All Time.[24] Entertainment Weekly ranked the film #4 on their list of "The Top 50 Cult Films."[25]

In June 2008, AFI revealed its "Ten Top Ten"—the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres—after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. Harold and Maude was acknowledged as the ninth-best film in the romantic comedy genre.[26]

The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists:

• 2000: AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs – #45[27]
• 2002: AFI's 100 Years...100 Passions – #69[28]
• 2006: AFI's 100 Years...100 Cheers – #89[29]
• 2008: AFI's 10 Top 10:
  • #9 Romantic Comedy Film[30]

At the 29th Golden Globe Awards, Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon received a nomination for Best Actor and Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy film, respectively.[31]

The music in Harold and Maude was composed and performed by Cat Stevens. He had been suggested by Elton John to do the music after John had dropped out of the project.[34] Stevens composed two original songs for the film, "Don't Be Shy" and "If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out" and performed instrumental and alternative versions of the songs "On the Road to Find Out", "I Wish, I Wish", "Miles from Nowhere", "Tea for the Tillerman", "I Think I See the Light", "Where Do the Children Play?" and "Trouble" which were either on the album Mona Bone Jakon or Tea for the Tillerman. Those albums had been released before the film. "Don't Be Shy" and "If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out" were not released on an album, until his 1984 compilation Footsteps in the Dark: Greatest Hits, Vol. 2.

There is some additional non–Cat Stevens music in the film. "Greensleeves" is played on the harp during dinner. During the scene where Harold is floating face-down in the swimming pool, the opening bars of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 are heard. A marching band is also heard playing a march titled "The Klaxon" by Henry Fillmore outside the church following a funeral. At the amusement part, a calliope version of the waltz "Over the Waves" by Juventino Rosas is played.

Colin Higgins later adapted the story into a stage play. The original Broadway production, starring Janet Gaynor as Maude and Keith McDermott as Harold, closed after four performances in February 1980.[36]

A French adaptation for television, translated and written by Jean-Claude Carrière, appeared in 1978. It was also adapted for the stage by the Compagnie Viola Léger in Moncton, New Brunswick,[37] starring Roy Dupuis.[38]

• List of American films of 1971

• Harold and Maude on IMDb
• Harold and Maude at the Internet Broadway Database
• Harold and Maude at AllMovie
• Harold and Maude at Rotten Tomatoes
• Guide to Harold and Maude filming locations
• A Boy of Twenty and a Woman of Eighty an essay by Leticia Kent at the Criterion Collection