Harold And Maude: The Film That Broke Several Taboos - BBC Culture

Emma Madden explores the unique appeal of this dark comedy about a death-obsessed teenager who falls in love with a life-adoring septuagenarian, now celebrating its 50th anniversary.

I was introduced to 1971's cult classic Harold and Maude in my first year of university, when contemplating the point of life. After watching several staged deaths, as well as the developing relationship between a churlish 19-year-old man and a free-spirited woman 60 years his senior, I finished the film with an answer to my question.

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Harold and Maude was originally conceived as a 20-minute film, written by Colin Higgins, then a UCLA film student during the height of the Flower Power movement of the 1960s. The script, which centres on a death-obsessed teenager who falls in love with a life-adoring septuagenarian – and consequently, with life itself – was written only a few years after Mike Nichols' The Graduate had sparked interest in romantic relationships between young men and older women, at a time when the counterculture was questioning boundaries. Although the age gap between Higgins' titular characters was much wider than Nichols' graduate and his older mistress, Paramount pictures agreed to take on the taboo-breaking project when the script was sent their way. It soon landed in the hands of Hal Ashby, one of the more revered directors of the New Hollywood era, who'd just received an Academy Award for his editing on In the Heat of the Night a few years earlier.

Alamy

As a studio-made yet thoroughly countercultural film, Harold and Maude proved a challenge for Paramount, and after a dismal promotional trail, the film opened to meagre box office sales. That same week, Disney's Lady and the Tramp stormed to the top of the charts, as audiences came to favour the love story between two cartoon dogs over one between a suicidal teenager and an eccentric elderly woman. Part of this can simply be attributed to poor timing. The anti-authoritarian, flower-power spirit that Harold and Maude espoused had generally fallen out of favour by the time of its release. The deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin the year before had signalled the end of an era. The Summer of Love slumped into dusk, and the hippie energy it carried curdled into cynicism. Audiences and critics mostly reacted to the film with revulsion. In one of the most famously scathing reviews Harold and Maude received, Variety wrote that the film was about "as funny as a burning orphanage".