Harold and Maude at a Funeral
This one divides people, and I understand why. The first act of Harold and Maude asks you to find a rich young man’s elaborate fake suicides funny, and if you cannot get there in the first ten minutes, the rest of the film will not work for you. I got there. The opening scene, in which Bud Cort’s Harold hangs himself in the drawing room while his mother, played by Vivian Pickles, walks in, glances up and continues making a phone call, told me exactly what kind of film I was in. It is a comedy of total deadpan, and his mother is funnier than he is.
Harold attends funerals of people he does not know, for the pleasure of it. At one of these he keeps noticing an old woman who is also there for no reason, eating from a bag of nuts and stealing a car afterward. This is Maude, played by Ruth Gordon, who is seventy-nine and treats every rule as a mild suggestion. The first act ends more or less when they have met properly and she has driven him somewhere in a vehicle that is not hers.
I had resisted this film for years because I had read that it was whimsical, which is a word I distrust. It is not whimsical. It is quite hard underneath, and the comedy is often about how badly adults treat a boy who does not fit. The scenes with the computer dating service and the psychiatrist are cruel in a way that still stings. Gordon is extraordinary, not because she is cute, but because she is completely unsentimental about herself.
The soundtrack is a set of songs by one singer-songwriter of the period and I expected to find it dated. Instead it carried the film through its quieter stretches. The picture quality on my secondhand disc is grainy and the colors have a slightly greenish cast that suits the material.
I watched it on a wet Saturday in March with the rain hammering on the roof and found myself laughing out loud, alone, three or four times in the first half hour. That does not happen to me often with films from this period. It is funnier, and sadder, than its reputation.