He mocks his therapist's psychobabble with silence his uncle in the army with overenthusiasm his wealthy mother's conservatism with fake and theatrical acts of self-directed violence.īut Harold gladly gives into the authority of Maude (Ruth Gordon) – a woman who steals hearses, and rescues 'public trees' from smog. Much like a precocious college student, Harold (Bud Cort) maintains his own sense of self through constant acts of resistance against these authority figures, and appears unable to communicate in the language of groupthink. Perhaps it was the film's Nietzschean spirit and its call to live deliberately, thoroughly, exuberantly that appealed to the stoned and listless liberal arts students of the '70s, or perhaps it was its satire of the American bourgeoisie and all its institutions – religion, psychology, the family, the military. It wasn't long before Harold and Maude would enjoy its cult revival, however, thanks to college campuses across the US, which screened late-night viewings of the film.
It soon landed in the hands of Hal Ashby, one of the more revered directors of the New Hollywood era, who'd just received an Academy Award for his editing on In the Heat of the Night a few years earlier.
Although the age gap between Higgins' titular characters was much wider than Nichols' graduate and his older mistress, Paramount pictures agreed to take on the taboo-breaking project when the script was sent their way. The script, which centres on a death-obsessed teenager who falls in love with a life-adoring septuagenarian – and consequently, with life itself – was written only a few years after Mike Nichols' The Graduate had sparked interest in romantic relationships between young men and older women, at a time when the counterculture was questioning boundaries. Harold and Maude was originally conceived as a 20-minute film, written by Colin Higgins, then a UCLA film student during the height of the Flower Power movement of the 1960s. The sci-fi that predicted modern crises After watching several staged deaths, as well as the developing relationship between a churlish 19-year-old man and a free-spirited woman 60 years his senior, I finished the film with an answer to my question. I was introduced to 1971's cult classic Harold and Maude in my first year of university, when contemplating the point of life.
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