Harold and Maude

• 1. Introduction

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  Harold and Maude is a 1971 American romantic black comedy-drama that opens with a young man hanging himself in the family living room. Except he is not really dead. Harold Chasen, played by Bud Cort, stages elaborate fake suicides as a hobby, attends strangers' funerals for recreation, and drives a hearse as his personal vehicle. He is nineteen years old and obsessed with death. His wealthy, self-obsessed mother watches his staged hanging without particular alarm and then checks her appointment book.

  At one of those random strangers' funerals, Harold encounters a seventy-nine-year-old woman named Maude. She steals cars without hesitation, uproots city trees to replant them in forests, and lives in a decommissioned railroad car. She also shares his fondness for funerals. What follows is one of Hollywood's most unlikely love stories. The film was dismissed by critics on release, rejected by audiences, and condemned by reviewers for its dark humor. Then, slowly, something different happened. By 1983, the film had turned a profit. By 1997, the Library of Congress had selected it for preservation as culturally significant. The questions worth asking are how a film so morbid became so beloved, how a master's thesis became a cult classic, and what exactly a concentration camp tattoo on an old woman's forearm has to do with a nineteen-year-old's fake suicides.

• 2. A Thesis Becomes a Film

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  Colin Higgins wrote Harold and Maude as his master's thesis at UCLA film school. He was working at the time as a pool boy for producer Edward Lewis. Higgins showed the script to Lewis's wife, Mildred, who was sufficiently impressed that she passed it to Stanley Jaffe at Paramount. Higgins had sold the script with the understanding that he would direct it himself. The studio thought otherwise after his test footage proved unsatisfactory, and he was told he was not ready.

  Hal Ashby stepped in as director, but only after securing Colin Higgins' blessing. Ashby then brought Higgins onto the production as co-producer, partly so the writer could observe and learn. Higgins later described his original conception as a play. It had then become a twenty-minute film school thesis before expanding into a feature. After the film's release, the story traveled back to the stage and onto the page: a novelization by Higgins was released alongside the film, and a play adaptation ran for several years in Paris.

  For the role of Maude, Ashby had a clear idea: he preferred a European actress. His list of candidates included Peggy Ashcroft, Edith Evans, Gladys Cooper, Celia Johnson, Lotte Lenya, Luise Rainer, Pola Negri, and Agatha Christie. Ruth Gordon, who would eventually take the part, reported that additional names under consideration included Edwige Feuillere, Elisabeth Bergner, Mildred Natwick, Mildred Dunnock, and Dorothy Stickney. For Harold, Ashby looked at Richard Dreyfuss, Bob Balaban, and John Savage, among others. John Rubinstein had been Higgins' original choice. Elton John was also on the list; Ashby had seen him perform live and hoped John would provide the film's music as well.

• 3. San Francisco as Character

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  Principal photography began in late December 1970 and wrapped in mid-March 1971. Nearly the entire film was shot in and around San Francisco and San Mateo County, and the locations themselves carry the film's meaning. Harold first glimpses Maude at Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma. They formally meet at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Palo Alto. Maude's railroad-car home sits on Oyster Point Boulevard in South San Francisco.

  The ruins of the Sutro Baths in San Francisco appear twice: once when Maude poses as a pacifist protester, and once when she apparently falls through a hole to her death. At the Emeryville mudflats, Harold holds Maude's hand and notices, for the first time, the number tattooed on her forearm. The Dumbarton Bridge is where a motorcycle officer twice pulls the pair over while they are transporting a transplanted tree. The film ends at Mori Point in Pacifica, where Harold drives his Jaguar hearse off a seaside cliff.

  For the Chasen family mansion, Ashby used Rosecourt Mansion in Hillsborough, California. Securing that location came with complications: director Otto Preminger had previously filmed in the area and had left local residents deeply antagonized, making them reluctant to cooperate. Ashby himself appears in an uncredited cameo at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, visible at a penny arcade watching a model train.

• 4. Cat Stevens and the Soundtrack

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  Elton John had been the original choice for the film's music. After John dropped out of the project, he suggested Cat Stevens as a replacement. Stevens composed two original songs for the film: "Don't Be Shy" and "If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out". He also performed instrumental and alternative versions of several previously released tracks, including songs from his albums Mona Bone Jakon and Tea for the Tillerman.

  The two original songs Stevens wrote for Harold and Maude did not appear on any studio album for over a decade. They remained unreleased until the 1984 compilation Footsteps in the Dark: Greatest Hits, Vol. 2. The first official soundtrack release came in 1972 in Japan only, on vinyl and cassette through A&M Records, but that release omitted both original songs entirely and included five tracks not even used in the film.

  A second soundtrack followed in December 2007 as a vinyl-only limited edition of 2,500 copies, with a thirty-page oral history of the film's production. The full soundtrack received its first wide commercial release on the 11th of February 2022, timed to the film's fiftieth anniversary. That version was remastered at Abbey Road Studios and included previously unheard audio masters of both original songs, discovered in the Island/A&M Records archive. The soundtrack charted at number 173 on the US Billboard 200 in July 2021, fifty years after the film first appeared in cinemas.

• 5. Cold Reviews, Warm Audiences

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  Roger Ebert gave Harold and Maude one-and-a-half out of four stars on its initial release. His review concluded: "Harold doesn't even make pallbearer." Vincent Canby, writing for a major New York newspaper, called the lead characters "so aggressive, so creepy and off-putting" that their pairing was inevitable, and accused the film of betraying its own life-affirming pretensions with a twist ending. Several other critics were offended by the dark humor at the film's core.

  The film was released with a vague, text-only poster and very little marketing support. Box office returns were poor. Yet it found its audience gradually, through repertory theaters that kept it on their screens. Danny Peary, author of the Cult Movies series, called it one of the runaway cult favorites of the seventies. He noted that in Minneapolis, residents actually picketed the Westgate Theater in an attempt to force the management to retire the film after it had run continuously for three years.

  By 1983, the film had finally made a profit. Time continued to reposition it. In 2003, Entertainment Weekly ranked Harold and Maude number four on its list of the top fifty cult films. At the 29th Golden Globe Awards, both Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon received nominations for Best Actor and Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy. In 2006, the Writers Guild of America placed the screenplay at number 86 on its list of the 101 Greatest Screenplays ever written.

• 6. Legacy and the Stage

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  Colin Higgins adapted Harold and Maude for the stage, and Jean-Claude Carriere translated that adaptation into French. The Paris production opened in 1973 at the Theatre Recamier, directed by Jean-Louis Barrault, with Madeleine Renaud as Maude and Daniel Riviere as Harold. Costumes were designed by Yves Saint Laurent. Renaud would return to the role of Maude in multiple subsequent revivals.

  A London production planned for 1978, with Bessie Love under consideration for Maude, never materialized. The Broadway production did open, starring Janet Gaynor as Maude and Keith McDermott as Harold, but closed after four performances in February 1980. The Yugoslav premiere, titled Harold i Mod, opened at the Belgrade Drama Theatre on the 23rd of March 1980. That production, directed by Paolo Magelli, remained in the theater's repertoire until Tatjana Lukjanova, who played Maude, died in 2003.