Harold and Maude (1971) (review)

Appropriate for a film that takes on loss as one of its main themes, death shapes the Criterion Collection edition of Harold and Maude (1971). Several of the film’s contributors—director Hal Ashby, screenwriter Collin Higgins, and lead actress Ruth Gordon—died before this edition went into production. Thus there are few amenities Criterion can offer for this edition. Ashby biographer Nick Dawson and producer Charles B. Mullvehill attempt to account for this lack in their composite commentary. Ashby’s and Higgins’s absences are also supplemented by seminar discussions from the mid-1970s that were compiled from heavily edited audio recordings and are accompanied by a photo montage of the director and screenwriter from the period. There are reprinted interviews with Gordon, costar Bud Cort, cinematographer John Alonzo, and executive producer Mildred Lewis.

Collaborative creative labor’s institutional and interpersonal struggle manifests in a number of places on the DVD. In one interview, folk singer Yusuf Islam/Cat Stevens, who provided the film’s music, notes his relative lack of control over his contributions to the film. Though he was happy with the placement of his material as another form of film narration, he states that he wished he could have produced “more complete” versions of his songs beyond the spare demo recordings he provided. These creative struggles are echoed through Harold and Maude’s supplemental features. Ashby, Higgins, Dawson, and Mullvehill each note that the screenwriter, who wrote the script while concluding his studies at the University of California, Los Angeles’s film program, intended to direct the film, and even shot the opening sequence as an audition for the studio, but was ultimately passed over for Ashby based on the modest success of his debut feature The Landlord (1970).

The Criterion release of Harold and Maude situates its cinematic legacy relative to its initial commercial failure. As noted by Matt Zoller Seitz in an excellent essay, Ashby and the film’s relationship to hippie counterculture had, by 1971, curdled into nihilism for many after systemic and personal acts of violence. This sense of death—and with it, the hope of renewal—particularly haunts Dawson’s contribution to the commentary, as he repeatedly links fatherless rich kid Harold’s suicide fetish to Ashby’s history with depression, an affliction that seized both the director and his father.

Harold and Maude’s original tagline was “A Boy of Eighteen, a Woman of Eighty.” Ostensibly, it is Harold’s story, particularly how love allows him to work past family traumas and his disdain for the bourgeois pageantry that surrounds him. He cannot reach a breakthrough in therapy, mocking the proceedings by wearing the same blue suits as his analyst. He responds to his mother’s efforts to pair him off with young, class-ascendant women by making them an audience to his elaborately staged fake suicides. These acts horrify the house guests but only mildly annoy his mother (Vivian Pickles), herself an odd, emotionally distant woman who channels her energies into choreographing social events delivered with a sense of theatrical decorum. The film begins and ends with Harold’s “suicide,” one of two routinized acts that connect his progression as a character. In the opening sequence, Harold lights candles to consecrate his hanging. In this act, he focuses on the Catholic ritual of self-sacrifice to pay homage to a life abbreviated by his alienation toward the provinces of being well-born. The film ends with Harold strolling away from his car, which he reduced to rubble by driving it off a cliff, strumming a banjo in tribute to the woman who galvanized his rebirth. He is literally transformed by his relationship with Maude, an elderly woman whom he meets while crashing strangers’ funerals. Like many films, Harold and Maude was shot out of sequence. Studio representatives objected to Cort’s sickly complexion during production. But over the course of their affair and brief marriage, we see blush and color gradually flood Harold’s ghostly pallor.

Harold and Maude may focus on the boy’s becoming...