They’re probably the most famous odd couple in movie history. Harold (Bud Cort) is a 20-year-old depressive who vies for the attention of his wealthy parents with his elaborately faked suicides. Maude (Ruth Gordon) is a vivacious 80-year-old with hobbies that border on the felonious. One interest they share is death, and the two meet at a funeral. Oh, it’s not for anyone either of them knows – Harold just loves the black-shrouded trappings (he drives a hearse) and Maude likes to be reminded of how wonderful it is to be alive.
The preciousness of life and the beauty of simply being in the world is a theme movies explore so often – and so often so ham-handedly – that you wouldn’t think it could be approached from an inventive angle, but that’s precisely what Harold and Maude does. Harold is world-weary without ever having seen the world; Maude, it seems, will never tire of it. Together, they embark on a series of slightly criminal but well-intentional adventures – such as transplanting a tree from a city sidewalk to a forest glen – that wake Harold from his lifelong somnambulism while reassuring Maude that her plans for her own life are exactly what they should be. And the somewhat taboo romance that blossoms between them may be unlikely, but it is never treated by director Hal Ashby or screenwriter Colin Higgins (whose original, 20-minute-long script was his UCLA graduate school thesis) as anything less than wonderful and appropriate.
But the reason for the cult status of this curious little film is its completely deadpan humour, presented with so little emphasis that it takes several viewing to recognize all the little bits that are intended as funny. The parade that collides with one of the funerals Harold and Maude attend is an obvious one, but watch the scene in which Harold consults, under duress, with his shrink (G. Wood) – both men are dressed identically in rich-white-guy duds, a sly commentary on the too-staid, too-examined life Harold is expected to lead. Harold’s hilarious “suicides” are presented in so unobtrusive a manner, often occurring virtually unnoticed in the background as other events unfold in the foreground, that they replicate the lack of reaction from Harold’s disappointed mother (Vivian Pickles – her name alone is hilarious), who is a wonder of intentional woodenness, of upper-class disdain for anything boorish or vulgar.
With an uplifting and unsentimental score by Cat Stevens and a fresh and warm appreciation for the eccentricities – in people and in the world – that make life interesting, Harold and Maude is probably the most charming movie about death that’s ever been made.
