Wednesday Movie - Harold and Maude

Harold is baby-faced young man obsessed with death. His family is horribly rich and Harold, lacking the need or desire for a job, is mostly employed with faking his suicide—hanging, shooting, or disembowelling himself as the mood takes him. His performances are all for the benefit of his superWASP, ice cold mother, but she has grown so used to his behaviour that she can do laps beside his apparently drowned corpse without breaking stride.

Maude is days short of eighty but more full of life then anyone Harold has ever met. She’s exuberant, irreverent, and quite literally wants to make every moment count. She’s also a car thief a drives a mile a minute.

Natually, Harold and Maude become lovers.

Whoa, whoa—simmer down! Don’t run away. This isn’t Basic Instinct or anything. Beyond a few kisses and a suggestive fade-to-black, there’s nothing all that sexual in the movie. Unless you see the Director’s Cut—now that shit’s crazy! Frottage, auto-erotic asphyxiation; let’s just say there are some things you see that you can’t unsee.

There’s not a lot more to the movie than their slowly growing relationship. Harold’s mother, tired of his antics and of having him underfoot, tries to set him up with women through computer dating (and it’s 1971, so we’re talking punch cards and room-sized mainframes.) Harold’s uncle, a decorated hero and war amputee, tries the lure of the army, but Harold's section eight act keeps him out of the military. So he’s left alone to fall in love with Maude. Of course, everyone assumes it’s an Oedipal thing, but they’re quite honestly and naturally in love.

I really enjoyed this movie. There are some flicks that try to hard to be wacky. The Big Lebowski was like that for me. Wouldn’t it be crazy if there were these random German nihilists, and Julianne Moore flew in naked on a zipline and made art, and there was this weird cowboy narrator? With Harold and Maude, it doesn’t seem contrived. It’s as if you’ve fallen into this universe where everyone is just slightly askew.

What amazes me is that I’d never even heard of this movie until it was mentioned off-hand in There’s Something About Mary, and even then I didn’t actually know what it was about until two or three years ago. What’s also weird is that the actors in these Wednesday movies are strangely connected. Ruth Gordon (Maude) was also the noisy neighbour/pal o’ Satan in Rosemary’s Baby. Bud Cort (Harold) also plays Radar O’Reilly in the movie version of MASH (which I haven’t got to yet, but is certainly on the master list.)

Big thanks to Isha for loaning me this one, and for getting me into Arrested Development—which is the best show ever. If you haven’t seen that show, you have to do something about it right now. Rent, buy, steal, kill kill kill!

Or maybe just rent.