Harold and Maude
Ruth Gordon, Bud Cort, Vivian Pickles
Director: Hal Ashby
Among the many fresh-faced filmmakers who breathed new life into 1970s Hollywood - Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese - probably none is as under-appreciated as Hal Ashby. In films such as The Last Detail, Shampoo, Coming Home and Being There, the director perfectly captured the era's confused, carefree zeitgeist, while coaxing award-winning performances out of such generation-definers as Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Jon Voight and Peter Sellers.
Yet for all their acclaim then, Ashby's films are now mostly ignored, lumped in with other classics from a decade that produced far too many. Ironically, his only effort to stand the test of time is one of his most frivolous (on the surface, at least): the romantic comedy Harold and Maude.
That sub-genre is labelled lightly: there's a lot about love in the film, and quite a bit of comedy, but this is far from a Friday night in with the girlfriend. Harold is young, rich, good looking, and obsessed with death. While attending one of his random daily funerals, he meets Maude, a 79-year-old Holocaust survivor with a lust for life, and falls in love.
It sounds oddly familiar, like a Wes Anderson-wannabe, and that's not far off. Two camps in particular have kept the Harold and Maude cult alive over the decades.
The first comprises pseudo-intellectuals who adore the film's many quirks, the eccentric little asides. But its idiosyncrasies are merely a means to its end of philosophical messages and cyclical themes of death and rebirth - which is where the other camp of libertarians and life-affirming Buddhists come in.