Harold & Maude

Unique and interesting. Both comical and serious.

was für ein moderner Film und so alt. Wäre vermutlich heutzutage noch der Aufreger

First watched this in the ‘70s. Love it as much now as then. I’m going to follow Maude’s lead when I’m 80. Long enough…

Harold and Maude is one of our great modern fairy tales. A cult classic in the Seventies, it’s now a timeless romantic document, its message simple in the way all fairy tales are. It says love and freedom are two sides of the same coin. Where one is absent, so is the other, neither able to exist in isolation without the other. Some may call this a romantic conceit, others a fact of life. I happen to be in the latter camp. The love shown in this film is one that sets a person free.

Maude is 79, nearing her 80th birthday. But in spirit she’s a teenager again, living wildly, spontaneously, irresponsibly. For kicks she joy rides, stealing cars, driving recklessly, burning rubber with police sirens wailing behind her. She also goes to funerals, enjoying their symbolism and solemnity — the pious church sermon, the hymns and organ music, the mourners in black, the sealed casket, the hearse and chauffeur, the mumbled religious homilies and tears falling over the open grave. She isn’t there to mock death. She’s there to face it without flinching.

Harold is 18 and likes funerals too, but for different reasons. He’s pale, impassive, morbid, a corpse in the making. He hates his mother, himself, life. He wants to die but hasn’t quite worked out how it will happen. But to that literal end he’s practising. His lone hobby, apart from attending funerals, is staging mock suicides. He’s the victim, his mother the unwitting spectator. In this endeavour he’s quite imaginative. He hangs himself, slashes his wrists in the bath, lops off a hand with a meat cleaver, shoots himself in the mouth with a handgun, sets himself on fire in the back garden and commits ritual hara kiri with a sharp samurai sword, seemingly disemboweling himself. He also floats face down in the family swimming pool, holding his breath for superhuman amounts of time in an effort to appear dead. These attention-getters are a cry for Mama’s absent love. In lieu of this missing emotion, she showers wealthy gifts on him. For instance, she buys him a flashy sports car to make him feel sporty, but we know Harold: he takes a welder’s torch to it and converts it into a hearse. So, he’s the lonely rich boy with no father, siblings, friends, mother’s love and self-esteem, an unhappy lad who longs for death but hasn’t yet bucked up the courage to top himself.

Maude lives in an old abandoned railway carriage with an odd assortment of collected things: stuffed animals, flowers, musical instruments, and a machine that replicates fragrances, or what she calls her odorifics. “Snowfall on 42nd Street,” for instance, is a smell to experience by breathing in air from a canister so named, thus transporting winter in New York to sunny California. Eccentric may be the telling adjective with her.

Death brings Harold and Maude together at the funeral of yet another stranger. “Did you know him?” they ask one another, then seem to bond over the surprising answer of “no”, each preferring the concept of death over any thoughts of the departed (whom they didn’t know anyway). In this way death acts as go-between in their friendship, one which will quickly blossom into love for Harold, as Maude is the only sentient and creative being he has ever met. Her motto, or one of them, is to “aim above morality” so as to “not miss out on the fun.” Needless to say, fun has forever been an alien concept and experience in Harold’s life. Education for him was boarding school. Home is prison. Friends don’t exist, nor did love till now.

Harold visits Maude’s railway carriage. He loves it. It feels like home, a real home. The objects inside are unique, interesting, personal. They all have stories behind them which Maude, forever happy to talk, generously informs Harold of. He’s fascinated. For the first time he’s interested in something other than death. Naturally, he falls in love with Maude. Age is meaningless, spirit and character everything. Maude is flattered, but keeps things light and platonic. Instead of lovemaking, they do other things together. They uproot a tree from the city and drive it to a forest to replant it where, in Maude’s words, “it can breathe again.” They steal cars and joyride together. They even steal a police motorcycle from a cop and leave the officer standing in their dust. They have a picnic. They eat and drink and talk to the birds. Harold yells like Tarzan and does somersaults. Then, overjoyed, he carries Maude on his back and runs through a field. For the first time in his life he’s alive and conscious of it. Love has rescued and transformed him, which is one of love’s greater attributes. He also plays the banjo, a musical instrument Maude has given to him. And of course they still go to funerals, sitting through the dreary church services and standing in the rain at cemeteries.

But things at home are as bad as ever for Harold. In fact, they are getting worse. Mother is worried about Harold. She thinks his suicidal antics have been going too far. It’s one thing to be a wise-aleck teenager with a morbid sense of humour, but another to remain stunted and not face up to certain adult responsibilities. Such as marriage, Mama informs him. To this end a string of computer dates from a dating service parade through their opulent mansion. They all love the building, setting, landscaping, decor, atmosphere. They even pretend to like Harold — the boy who cannot laugh or smile or even speak intelligibly above a mumbled monotone. Cold fish or not, Harold is popular. All the young women profess to be keenly interested in him. That is, until Harold pulls the trigger again with the gun to his head or pulls off some other seemingly deadly prank in their midst.

Mother’s patience is shredded. Harold’s weekly visits to a shrink are not going well. The psychiatrist can make no headway because Harold remains clammed up. In desperation, she thinks his Uncle Victor, a military man, can talk him into joining the army. This fails. Harold pretends to be a gung-ho lunatic who wants to shoot, scalp, dismember and eat the enemy. Even for Uncle Victor, a red-white-and-blue racist and jingoist, this is too much. Uncle Victor declares Harold unfit for duty.

Harold is a nowhere man, a loser and misfit. Even his put-upon mother is coming to this awful, inconsolable conclusion. But just when all seems lost Harold astonishes everyone by announcing his engagement to Maude. His mother can’t believe it and demands to see her photo. Harold has one, a recent one. His mother nearly faints. The psychiatrist, priest and Uncle Victor are equally appalled. They knew Harold was eccentric, far from normal, but this prank takes the cake. Yet the joke we’re in on and they’re not is that it’s no joke this time. Harold loves Maude, truly loves her, and throughout the course of this magical film we see how and why this could be.

Maude loves him too, she tells him. But her love is very democratic, not reserved solely for him. In fact what she loves even more than Harold is life itself. The funerals are a reminder of this for her — a way of remembering all that she has and has experienced. She is happy, content, at peace — all the things Harold isn’t but may become by learning from her.

In some fairy tales the frog is transformed into a prince but cannot remain a prince. In the end he returns to his modest lily pad in the pond. So it is in this one too. The great and only love of Harold’s life cannot last because Maude cannot last on Earth. A crisis of life and death happens and Harold is forced to face it. He must choose.

It’s an old film (1971) and Cat Stevens sings throughout on the soundtrack. His songs are hippyish and optimistic. He was in the flower power crowd and rode the peace train with his hard-headed woman to a place where all the children could play and have tea with the tillerman. Harold learns to play one of his songs on the banjo. He is not proficient at it, but he pegs away, wanting to learn, to sing and dance, to click his heels. And in the end, this is what he sings as the credits roll by:

If you want to sing out, sing out
If you want to be free, be free
Cos there’s a million things to be
You know that there are

Dammit!
I was so prepared to absolutely hate this movie.
I watched this movie in a moment of “I need to watch something I don’t agree with in order to expand my horizons” kind of thing.
I fully expected to have my relatively right-wing beliefs confirmed only to have my expectations dumped into the coffee grinder of ideas and pulverized into an understanding that, in many ways, I’ve been right all of these years. (Run on, sentence, run on.)
Talk about missing the boat…
My understanding of this movie was that a perverted old lady boinks a fifteen year old boy. That’s it. I hated this premise, I knew way in advance that I would hate this thing.
Man, was I wrong.
Summary: Maude is a 79 year old revolutionary-communist that had the ability to live by her insane code forever. Harold is a rich, pampered teenager obsessed with death and dying since he was a child. Harold and Maude meet only to find that they have much in common. Harold and Maude go on a robbery spree that eventually ends with:
1. Lots of theft that results in no consequences.
2. Harold falling in love with, and eventually sleeping with Maude.
3. Maude dying, and…
4. Harold making a new unscripted life for himself.
End of summary.
The idea of unpaid consequences makes me crazy. In my world, Maude would have died fifty years before the movie started. Maude would have tried to steal my car and I’d’ve blasted her during the getaway only to have people hear me complain, “Aw hell! I got buckshot holes all over the back end! Thank God that she didn’t make off with my car!” Blood would be soaking the car inside while I did what I could to clean up the mess so as to drive my vehicle away from the scene of the crime.
However, I see Maude as a character after my own heart. I view general systems as my opponent. I rebel against standardized rules but my rebellion ends at purchased property. If someone or some entity paid for an object, I have no right to take or destroy said property. Maude had broader margins: Just because you SAY that you own something doesn’t men that you actually OWN it.
This is an interesting conundrum that leads to the ultimate showdown, my rules versus your rules. Again, in my world, I’ll kill you for taking my Twinkies, no exceptions. Maude, on the other hand, bets on the exceptions and gets away with it every time, as she probably should.
Do I like Maude? Yes. Do I believe that she should have gotten away with the things that she did? Hell if I know. That’s why I now love this movie, it makes me question my beliefs.
In retrospect, I have two observations:
1. The harakiri scene is absolutely worth the price of admission. I was completely alone when I watched this and STILL burst out laughing at the setup. (I NEVER laugh out loud at movies when I’m alone.)
2. The soundtrack was recorded by none other than the ultimate musical pariah, Cat Stevens.
Watch this movie with the blinders off, I promise that you’ll love it.