I am very glad I decided to snap up the opportunity to buy Harold and Maude on DVD at a knockdown price this weekend.

I have seen it before, and I loved it, but this time it hit me deeper. Perhaps because I embrace difference and diversity a lot more now than when I first saw it. Also because sometimes I, like Harold, am scared of life, and Harold and Maude is a real life-affirming movie. I like movies about vulnerable people, movies in which I can see little reflections of myself. Movies that challenge me to stop existing and to really live.

I can't get those final few images out of my mind now, nor the Cat Stevens song the film ends with. (Can't remember the words now, but the beautiful harmonies keep running through my head.) I can see Harold and Maude climbing onto my top ten someday soon.

Anyone else want to chime in with their thoughts on this precious movie?

An all-time favourite of mine. I think I've seen it more times than any other film - and all but one of those viewings in the theatre, back in the late seventies and early eighties when it seemed to be in constant rotation at the revival theatres.

Where did you find the cheap DVD? I'd love to pick one up myself.

That final song (as well as a few others from the film) is available on Cat Stevens "Footsteps In The Dark: Greatest Hits Volume Two." Wonderful, wonderful.

Here's something I wrote about the film last fall.

HAROLD & MAUDE (1971, USA)

A defining picture for me, at the time. It gave expression to so much that was important in my life. I didn't see it until 1979 or so, at a revival house, and in the next few years saw it quite a few more times (in an era before video rentals). I took kids from my church youth group (I was a youth pastor, of sorts, for a couple years), and we'd talk endlessly about freedom in Christ, about taking hold of life instead of giving in to a culture of death, and about all the funny stuff. It became kind of a litmus test for new girlfriends (two – I was no Cassanova): did they get it? If not, would they ever understand me? (Hey, I was young and melodramatic.) Maybe the splendid irony is the fact that I ended up marrying one of those young women - while she liked the movie fine, it certainly didn't speak to her the way it spoke to me. Its themes just aren't that important to her. So, as a test for romantic compatibility, HAROLD & MAUDE flunked. (Or maybe there was a deeper something embedded in the film: the whole thing was shot in the Redwood City area where my wife grew up. I was right that H&M was profoundly linked to my romantic destiny: I just didn't know in what way. Wow. There is more in heaven and earth....)

I was never nuts about the "free love" element of the film, but that seemed to me - and seems - like an obligatory trope more than something essential to the film, which thumbs its nose at lots of other "establishment" stuff, so why not sexual mores and ageism (though that's not a word anybody was using then)? I just edited that bit out, pushed it to the side of my plate – I wasn't about to let one piece of wilted lettuce in the salad spoil the whole meal.

One could certainly argue that the freedom this movie celebrates is in no way freedom in Christ: that its "do whatever makes you feel alive" libertinism is a road to bondage more often than it's a route to the true liberty found in God's kindom. I guess. But I've never expected movies to "toe the line" - it's enough for me when a given flick portrays something that's important to me, even if at the same time it's failing in another way. Since finding myself a citizen of the Kingdom of God, I've been acutely aware that, here on earth, here in time, I'm a stranger in a strange land. And, like ex-pats all over the world, I get excited when something, anything here reminds me of home.

When I met Jesus, freedom was at the heart of His word to me. Freedom from judgement for sin, freedom from being concerned about what people think of me, freedom from what I then called "The System" (that I now think of as principalities and powers), freedom to make music and create theatre, freedom to think fresh and make mistakes, all covered by God's infinite grace. I've never really understood Christians for whom the faith provides a set of rules that tell them how to behave in order to feel secure, or to please God, or to keep from losing their reservation at the marriage feast: I accept them as siblings in God's family (that's so varied it's bizarre), but I must confess I don't see the family resemblance. Or if I do, I might see it in the way we treat people or how we be, but certainly not in how we think, or see the world.

Back to HAROLD & MAUDE. If there's a single detail that gives the film more weight, more credibility, than its hippy-dippy "If it feels good do it" appearance might suggest, it's Maude's personal history, glimpsed only in a moment (which I won't spell out, for the sake of those who haven't seen the film). And, perhaps, the corollary fact that, while an unbalanced message of liberation is destructive for some, it may have been just the corrective poor, imprisoned Harold needed: for this death-obsessed young man, a gale-force breath of life didn't blow him off-course, but pushed him back in the right direction. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for a dying man. The right medicine for the right patient.

I guess there must have been a little of Harold in me, growing up. Apparently I needed the same medicine. Certainly this film offered the invigorating touch of Christ to me during some years when I was slowly becoming uncrippled, and to this day I can't see that film or hear Cat Stevens' sing "Don't wear fear or nobody will know you're there" without knowing God is speaking directly to me.

Have you read Darren Hughes great work on Hal Ashby at www.sensesofcinema.com? He has some great commentary on Harold and Maude in that piece.

Let's make this a bit easier...

SencesofCinema

Thanks, ya'll.

Ron, you talk about a "free love" element of the film. To what are you referring? Harold and Maude's relationship is unconventional, certainly, but I never saw it as being about "free love". Do you see the central characters' relationship as morally wrong?

Should we make it easier still?

Hal Ashby by Darren Hughes

(Dunno whether this really counts as a spoiler, but I want a clean record, and I ain't takin' no chances! )

From Hughes's article:

Isn't that just cinematic shorthand for entering into a relationship? To me, that's potentially about love, commitment, faithfulness and monogamy as it much as it's (potentially) about "free love". Does the film say much either way?

Since you all were kind enough to link to my piece, let me just say that, if you haven't done so before, spend some time with Ashby's other films. I'm toying with the idea of writing a booklength study of his life and work, and there aren't many filmmakers to whom I would be willing to devote that much time and energy.

Funny this thread should pop up now. A local independent theatre will be showing Harold and Maude just around my birthday as part of their Midnight Movie series. I've never seen it (::gasp:: I know, but in my defense it came out a couple of years before I was even born), but now I plan to from what little I've read here - and in the theatre, no less. Then I'll come back and read more in depth past the "spoilers" omens, and hopefully contribute.

For the 2 or 3 of you in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, it will be showing at the Inwood on June 4 & 5.

As is Chaplin's Modern Times on June 18 & 19, and...

wait for it...



Top Secret! on July 9 & 10.

We just rewatched this; my wife tells me she read somewhere that someone said this was the sole convincing love story of the twentieth century. She can't remember where she read this. Does anyone remember reading this?

I caught this recently and I couldn't help but feel some conenctions to the recent Garden State. I'm not comparing the films in terms of overall quality, but it seems that both films address the anti-establishment teen who has to figure out that the artiface of society doesn't justify a withdrawl from life. Ghost World does the same thing. This film is timeless because I think so many teens and post-teens experience this distrust of institutional society, but they must all find their place within it. I imagine films like this will be made for a long time.

I saw the films in the reverse order, but had the same reaction: both are "free spirit loosens up the detached-from-life guy, in the context of death and funerals." And it sounds like GS has struck a similar chord among twenty-somethings at H&M did in its day. (Even the soundtracks have similarities, a kind of alt-folk acoustic angsty thing going on.)

I'm with you, Danny Boy!

(Did you know HAROLD & MAUDE is also a play?)

Yeah that would go over GREAT around here. (sarcasm)


But no, I didn't know. Ever done it?

Nope. But I have a copy.

I'd do it at Pacific Theatre if the cast weren't so darn big.

Oh right! you have a small space, no? What's the largest piece you've done?

It's not so much the size of the stage as the size of the payroll. With 9M and 8W at $500+ a week, our normal three week rehearsal / four week run would cost, oh, seventy thousand bucks? Just for the cast? With the rest of production expenses and only 120 seats to sell, five shows a week, I'd have to double my ticket prices and sell out the entire run. The cold equations.

Of course, this does raise the possibility of staging it as an emerging artist / community production, which we do about once a year. Hmmmm.... I've got the PERFECT actress for Maude, though I'd have to pay her Equity. But that I can afford. Hmmm.....

Wonder how you'd do the scene where they drive the sportscar off the cliff? Maybe stage size does matter after all....

Oh, your question. Biggest show we've done? Community show, YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU. Professional show, SHADOWLANDS, which we just closed: only half the actors were paid (Equity scale), the others were apprentices and community actors, we almost completely sold it out and only lost $7500.

Ah, theatre.

Ouch.

Well you'll be glad to know that my play is nicely trimmed to 5M 4F. I have some actors that appear in video footage, but Art Within has already agreed to put together a video package to go with production rights.

Glad? Only if you think I've been looking for an excuse not to produce it!

I fear that's way too big for us. Unless it's possible for an Emerging Artist showcase. (My play A BRIGHT PARTICULAR STAR has a cast about that size, and we're closing next season with it. But it's only doable because most of the roles can be played by twenty-somethings. Yours?)

Let me think...

M - late 20-'s - must have thinning hair
M- late 20's - attractive
F - mid-late 20's - attractive
M - 70's
M- 50's
M - any age - adult
F- 19-21
F- 30-45

Hey wait that's only 5m and 3F - even smaller than I remembered. So only 2 tough castings (outside the 20-30 range) there.

Oh, but they all have to be Pakistani midgets with hairlips. Did I forget to mention that?