Harold and Maude

Movie Information

In Brief Hal Ashby's timeless romance between a young man (Bud Cort) and a 79-year-old woman (Ruth Gordon) has lost none of its quirky, counterculture charm since it first appeared 42 years ago. The film, its performances and its Cat Stevens soundtrack are still as fresh today as they were in 1971.
Score:

Genre: Dark Comedy Romance
Director: Hal Ashby
Starring: Bud Cort, Ruth Gordon, Vivian Pickles, Cyril Cusack, Charles Tyner, Eric Christmas
Rated: PG

Back in 2004, I wrote: “Before there was a Rocky Horror Picture Show phenomenon, and before midnight movies like Phantom of the Paradise, and well before Tommy and Carrie were the order of the day, there was Harold and Maude. Director Hal Ashby’s cult classic spoke to the generation of the early 1970s much as Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night and Karel Reisz’s Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment had to the preceding one of the mid-‘60s. In fact,Harold and Maude was not only embraced by those ‘70s kids, but its wholly iconoclastic worldview significantly broadened the way many of them thought. Detailing the non-platonic romance of Harold (play by the even-younger-looking-than-his-23-years Bud Cort) and Maude (the 75-year-old Ruth Gordon), the film crossed a line that even today seems almost unthinkable. Of course, it did so partly by creating two characters who were far from anything that might be called average.”

Full review here: http://avl.mx/r6

Harold and Maude is being shown Saturday, March 16 at 6:30 p.m. at the Laughing Heart Cinema in Hot Springs.

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About Ken Hanke
Head film critic for Mountain Xpress from December 2000 until his death in June 2016. Author of books "Ken Russell's Films," "Charlie Chan at the Movies," "A Critical Guide to Horror Film Series," "Tim Burton: An Unauthorized Biography of the Filmmaker."

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