Hal Ashby (1971)
A large, pretty youthful turnout in NFT1 and Pauline Kael says that the film, right from the start, was a cult success with young filmgoers. I remember when it first came out but retained in my mind not much more than that its treatment of the relationship between a teenage boy and an elderly woman was daring. It’s stayed high on a list of films I’ve meant to get around to seeing for the best part of 40 years so I probably shouldn’t complain that I found it a shocking disappointment. The Wikipedia entry displays a poster for the film with the strapline ‘His [Harold’s] Hangups are Hilarious!’ I found Harold’s repeated ‘suicide attempts’ tedious but what’s startling about the presentation of the boy’s morbidity in this supposedly ‘dark’ film is how shallow it is – it’s played just for laughs, even though I couldn’t supply any. In a similar way, the controversial geriatric-adolescent relationship is largely neutralised by the fact that Bud Cort, as Harold, has no sexual presence and, to a lesser extent, by the fact that Ruth Gordon, although she was in her early seventies when she played Maude, is well preserved. And while the film seems to be anti-stereotyping in what it says about the two main characters as potential sexual partners, the character of Maude is in other respects familiar: the fact that she’s a free spirit of a decidedly non-conformist kind isn’t enough to conceal the tiredness of the idea of an old person with a seize-the-day approach to life. The attempts to get laughs out of her vigorously delinquent behaviour are condescendingly ageist.
I kept wondering whether the film, even if feels lame now, might have seemed subversive when it first appeared but I can’t think this is likely. Harold and Maude, written by Colin Higgins (who subsequently had a brief career as a director – Foul Play, Nine To Five, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas) is dark only on the surface. When the prospect of going deeper occasionally looms up (when the camera picks up a concentration camp number stamped on Maude’s arm, for example), the film quickly recoils. It may be an expression of the countercultural spirit sweeping through American films of the time but it’s ‘anti-establishment’ in an automatic way and it panders to, without challenging, a youth audience. Military men, the police, a Catholic priest, and a psychoanalyst – the usual suspects – are caricatures that, by 1971, were surely predictable (and were surely lampooned more imaginatively) as such. The 2008 audience at BFI still reacted as if this was enduring trenchant satire. Later in the decade, Hal Ashby (whose second feature this was) proved himself, with The Last Detail and Shampoo, a fine and sensitive director of actors and of comedy but neither gift is in evidence here.
Ruth Gordon has the comic self-confidence and distinctiveness to keep things going but she lacks interpretative (and vocal) light and shade. Bud Cort’s Harold certainly looks cartoonishly remarkable – the cadaverously lanky body, the bloodless complexion and exophthalmic gaze all seem right for the macabre Harold, but only on an Addams family level. It’s probably a relief that Cort, because he’s not able to suggest a living human being, can’t get across what appears the sentimental concluding message of Harold and Maude – that Maude enables Harold to move from an obsession with death to an embrace of life – but it’s still uncomfortable to watch Cort because he’s so inadequate to the task in hand. Harold’s cold, egocentric mother is played, with characteristic overemphasis and knowing assurance, by Vivian Pickles. Cyril Cusack is wasted in a one-scene cameo as the artist whose model Maude is. The wet, vaguely spiritual songs are by Cat Stevens.
11 December 2008
