Harold and Maude (1971)
Directed by Hal Ashby
A deadpan young man obsessed with death meets an eccentric septuagenarian who teaches him to live life to the fullest.
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10 films that influenced Harold and Maude
What critics say influenced Harold and Maude
Building on the innovations of the landmark releases The Graduate (1967) and Easy Rider (1969), Harold and Maude explores outsider mentalities through fragmented cutting, using those music montages to embellish its themes and create a feeling of emotional suspension.
Hal Ashby’s film, also sort of a sweeter, gentler, less satirical companion to The Graduate, which preceded it by three years, follows Harold (Bud Cort), a morose young man given to faking suicide scenes, driving a modified hearse, and quietly crashing funerals as his distracted mother (Vivian Pickles) looks on with a combination of concern, distaste, and disinterest.
Mainstream audiences also steered clear, suggesting that the trail for artful, left-of-center Hollywood films blazed by The Graduate (1967) and Easy Rider (1969) was already starting to shut down long before Spielberg’s little shark movie launched the summer blockbuster craze four years later.
The pair fall into a romantic relationship that shouts in the face of societal mores as Cat Stevens's uplifting score does for the movie what Simon and Garfunkel did for "The Graduate."
The film’s suite of songs, by Cat Stevens (now known as Yusuf) is exquisite, possibly the best collection of pop songs by the same artist in a movie besides Simon & Garfunkel’s songs for The Graduate .
Like The Graduate , the script for Harold and Maude has the idea of a doomed generation but shows every generation is damned.
Building on the innovations of the landmark releases The Graduate (1967) and Easy Rider (1969), Harold and Maude explores outsider mentalities through fragmented cutting, using those music montages to embellish its themes and create a feeling of emotional suspension.
Mainstream audiences also steered clear, suggesting that the trail for artful, left-of-center Hollywood films blazed by The Graduate (1967) and Easy Rider (1969) was already starting to shut down long before Spielberg’s little shark movie launched the summer blockbuster craze four years later.
The unlikely romance between 20-year-old, moon-faced, proto-goth Harold (Bud Cort) and uber-sprightly 80-year-old Maude (Ruth Gordon) remains one of the cinemas most memorable love affairs and the films idiosyncratic character and atmosphere make it one of the least-dated counter-culture titles churned out by Hollywood in the aftermath of Easy Rider.
Some groundbreaking films are so influential that watching them today can result in experiences either uncanny (as you realize how many iconic scenes or images you’ve absorbed through rip-offs and parodies), oblivious (as you fail to notice the debut of filmmaking techniques that became commonplace in or before your lifetime), or both (Citizen Kane is the easiest example: a technical tour de force that can be pre-viewed almost entirely through Simpsons parodies alone).
Even if this idea strikes you as immensely comic, you might well want to miss Hal Ashby's "Harold and Maude," a comedy that pretends to be as thoroughly in favor of life as "You Can't Take It With You," whereas it's quite as much about death as it appears to be.
Harold and Maude meet at one of the anonymous funerals they like to attend, fall in love while transplanting the tree, and marry on the eve of Maude's birthday.Even if this idea strikes you as immensely comic, you might well want to miss Hal Ashby's "Harold and Maude," a comedy that pretends to be as thoroughly in favor of life as "You Can't Take It With You," whereas it's quite as much about death as it appears to be.Like Harold, the movie is fascinated by the mechanics of simulated suicide — by hanging, by slashed wrists and throat, by a shot in the head, by drowning, by harakiri and, most hilariously, by immolation.
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The best black comedies communicate pangs of conscience about the hopeless lives they create -- George Axelrod's "Lord Love a Duck" was perhaps the most outstandingly soft-hearted one.
Harold is a withdrawn rich boy who delights in staging elaborate — often gory — “suicides” to torment his very-proper control-freak of a mother (Vivian Pickles, best known as Isadora Duncan in the Ken Russell TV film Isadora), who remains blissfully unaffected by his theatrics.
As Peary notes, this black comedy by director Hal Ashby remains “one of the most popular of all cult movies” — one which, unlike King of Hearts (another counter-culture hit of the era), actually “holds up quite well today”.
Director Hal Ashby’s cult classic spoke to the generation of the early 1970s much as Richar Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night and Karel Reisz’s Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment had to the preceding one of the mid-’60s.
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Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Characters
She forces him to spend time with his Army officer uncle Victor--played by Charles Tyner in the best portrayal of a bloodthirsty military officer this side Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove.
The fact that it became a huge cult sensation on the midnight movie circuit along with such cinematic oddities as El Topo (1970), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), and Eraserhead (1978) is much less difficult to fathom.