Hal Ashby's HAROLD AND MAUDE: An Appreciation

When 70’s director extraordinaire Hal Ashby made his second feature, HAROLD & MAUDE (1971), he was still at the start of his directing career even though he’d labored over 20 years in Hollywood to get there.

In some ways, this seems the secret to the Hal Ashby paradox for this programmer. Arriving in the City of Angels in the late 40’s after riding the rails and traveling the US, Ashby decided he was meant for movies. He got a gig copying scripts and from there worked his way up to being one of the most sought out editors of the 1960s (he won the Best Editing Academy Award for 1967’s IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT).

The reason for this prologue is to suggest that Hal Ashby had a huge well of craft behind him. On top of this, while he may have been everyone’s favorite Hollywood hippie director and pot smoker and whatever else, he was also a painstakingly hard worker who would obsess over scenes, edits, cuts for days and weeks on end.

This collision of humanism, craft, and obsessive work would culminate in the 70’s with one of the greatest runs of movies (HAROLD & MAUDE, THE LAST DETAIL, SHAMPOO, BOUND FOR GLORY, COMING HOME, BEING THERE) of any moviemaker of that era.

HAROLD & MAUDE, like all of Ashby’s greatest works, is startlingly earnest and tender at the same time its wry, hilarious, and ambiguous. Harold, a rich yet aimless and depressed young man of 20, meets Maude, a wildly eccentric yet bracingly vital woman of 79, as they both like to frequent the funerals of other people. Harold discovers in Maude a way to live and embrace life that his mother, his class, his country, his youth has not taught him. Maude discovers in Harold one last great romance.

It’s stunning how well this premise works when you think about all the ways this movie could have gone wrong or just seemed slightly off-putting. Without a doubt, Ruth Gordon gives one of the great performances as Maude. We all fall in love with her. And she’s so stunningly beautiful in a spritely way that we completely understand why Harold would fall for her over the more surface beauties of the hilarious string of computer (a precursor to online) dates with whom his comically domineering Mother tries to set him up.

Maude also remains somewhat of a mystery to us (as she does to Harold) the entire movie. We discover many of her secrets (she was a concentration camp survivor who lost her husband and most of her family before immigrating) but we don’t ever fully get some kind of one line Hollywood answer about why she still somehow so loves life.

Bud Cort is so good as Harold that his dead pan performance and quiet yet strong choices anchor the entire movie. We come to admire Harold who, with his faked suicides, amputations, etc, is clearly rebelling against a society that dictates the path he, as a rich scion, is supposed to take (the military, a wife, titan of business, etc).

Though this programmer has seen HAROLD & MAUDE before and always admired it, it was the most recent viewing that was the revelation. Sometimes HAROLD & MAUDE becomes a kind of short-hand for rom-com quirk or the movie that inspired Wes Anderson or that fun weird cult movie from the early 70’s.

But if one can watch the movie in an open frame of mind with an open heart, it becomes a deeply touching affirmation of life that simultaneously wrestles with all of life’s horrors. This squid and the whale struggle defines all of Ashby’s greatest work. The Navy Police of THE LAST DETAIL are trying to show a Young Prisoner about to get years in jail a great time in New York. Warren Beatty’s philandering hairdresser tries to commit to his equally philandering on again off again true love in SHAMPOO while they all ignore the country going down the drain politically. Jon Voight’s paraplegic Vietnam Vet tries to re-engage with life after seeing the horrors of war. And Peter Seller’s simple gardener Chance somehow rises to power by paradoxically not seeking it.

Ashby was always insistent that movies have ambiguity. Not confused ambiguity. Just an open-endedness that the audience could wrestle with when the lights came up.

But he achieved this through an assiduous practice of his craft, especially his singular understanding of editing which allowed him to craft scenes, sequences, rhythms that allowed for deeply layered, sometimes contradictory emotions.

HAROLD AND MAUDE thus is both a celebration of life AND death. An acceptance of horror and disappointment that still ends with an affirmation that existence is worth engaging in even if the results are not guaranteed.

So if you have 90 minutes every few years or so. Watch Hal Ashbys HAROLD & MAUDE from time to time. You might be surprised how much it hits you (as it did this programmer) after you’ve taken a few existential punches to the face but find yourself, maybe even to your surprise, still saying yes and moving forward.

Written by Craig Hammill. Founder & Programmer of Secret Movie Club.