CriterionCast

Scott Reviews Hal Ashby’s Harold & Maude [Masters of Cinema Blu-ray Review]

harold2a

Into the early 1970s, the rebel spirit that fueled the late 1960s was still burning strong, and a number of outsider filmmakers seized the Hollywood machine to express it. Michelangelo Antonioni unleashed Zabriskie Point, Robert Altman wrangled MASH into theaters, and Hal Ashby made his first major mark on popular culture with Harold and Maude, an anarchic love story between a twenty-year-old man and an eighty-year-old woman.

That romance has become its most defining trait, but it is its destructive link to those other films (as well as late ’60s landmarks like if…. and Easy Rider) that at once makes it more of interest, and yet completely undoes it. Or perhaps it is the romance that destroys the anarchy. If there’s something to live for, to love, what use is destruction? I have never liked Harold and Maude, and revisiting it most recently for this piece did not endear it any further to me. It is among the most brazenly misanthropic and hateful films I’ve ever seen, glorifying theft, destruction, and lack of compassion as positive acts of self-expression, a way of discovering oneself. At least Easy Rider had the “we blew it” line.


harold6


Harold (Bud Cort) doesn’t fit in. To ease the horrible pain of having tremendous wealth and living with a mother who doesn’t share his values, he leaches off of other people’s misery by attending funerals for complete strangers. At one such event, he meets Maude (Ruth Gordon), who also has no concern at all for the feelings (or property) of others. They’re perfect for one another. Maude teaches him the glory of stealing and demolishing things, insisting that if others get upset about it, well, they’re just too uptight anyway and deserve what’s coming to them.

Perhaps recognizing how rare it is to find someone with as little sensitivity to others as they each hold, they fall in love, and yes, on first viewing, it is fairly shocking to see a young man lying nude in bed with a woman of Ruth Gordon’s age. Good on them, that moment lands. Few others do. Ashby’s training as an editor makes for some playful passages, and Colin Higgins’s screenplay has a sharp wit about it, but at the end of the day, it is asking for sympathy for two characters who have no regard for anyone else, in a film that treats every other person as a joke. I don’t mind the point-and-laugh film as a concept, but not when it insists that there are exceptions. Either everybody is ridiculous, or nobody is. To single out exceptions is dishonest and cruel.

Ebert famously said that movies are empathy machines; Harold and Maude encourages contempt.


harold4


Should this particular landmark of the New Hollywood era be to your taste, the new Blu-ray from Masters of Cinema provides a wonderful presentation of the film. I don’t have the Criterion edition to compare, but MoC beautifully renders the grain and detail, letting the contrast shine through in such a way that the whites verge on over-exposure, but still feel quite natural to the image.

MoC provides two very good supplements. First, they port over Criterion’s audio commentary with film scholar Nick Dawson and the film’s producer, Charles B. Mulvehill. They were recorded separately, and have been very well edited together to provide insight into the production history, behind-the-scenes anecdotes, context, and analysis. Tremendous track. After that, look to a video interview with scholar David Cairns, who fills out a bit more on the analysis side (unfortunately, there’s really only so deep you can go into how the film was made, so some gets repeated).

Further supplementing the release is a terrific booklet, featuring an interview excerpt from 1976 with Ashby, another with Higgins from 1982, and a really entertaining interview with Gordon from the set of the film, published in 1971. She was a firecracker, as they say.

Harold and Maude is not my cup of tea, to put it mildly, but if you are one of the many who have been touched by the film, Masters of Cinema have done an outstanding job in presenting it.


Scott Nye

Scott Nye loved movies so much, he spent four years at Emerson College earning a career-free degree in Media Studies. Now living in Los Angeles, he's trying to put that to some sort of use. OFCS member, film writer, day-tripper.