Give me an E. Otherwise, you got nothing to talk about in the locker room. Sign In. Play trailer Comedy Drama Romance. Director Hal Ashby. Colin Higgins. Top credits Director Hal Ashby. See more at IMDbPro. Trailer Harold and Maude. Video Photos Top cast Edit. Ruth Gordon Maude as Maude. Bud Cort Harold as Harold. Vivian Pickles Mrs. Chasen as Mrs. Cyril Cusack Glaucus as Glaucus.
Eric Christmas Priest as Priest. Wood Psychiatrist as Psychiatrist. Susan Madigan Girlfriend as Girlfriend. Ray K. Henry Dieckoff Butler as Butler. Philip Schultz Doctor as Doctor.
Hal Ashby. More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. It was great, but she's pretty down, you have to apologise to her! Cort and Ashby grew close over the production.
After filming, says Cort, Paramount took control of the edit from Ashby, so Cort went to a publicity meeting with the studio and told them he'd refuse to promote the film unless they gave control back to a devastated Ashby, which they did other than a kissing scene which Paramount boss Robert Evans hated. Cort, though, then found himself persona non grata with the studio; his new film, which is released by Paramount, marks the first time he's worked with them since.
When the film came out, though, it met with scathing reviews, bombed, and vanished from mainstream cinemas within a week. If you asked people what it was about, ultimately it became a boy who was fucking his grandmother. It was a bad time for Cort, whose father died of MS aged 50, just after shooting ended. This, though, was what finally brought Cort and co-star Ruth Gordon close. The morning after his father died, she called him and said: "'Oh, honey, let me tell you about the day my father died.
From that moment on, that was one of the most important friendships I've ever had. She was a great woman. The next few years were fallow; a period of self-inflicted inaction. The film that made him, he says now, "was a blessing and a curse". He was typecast, offered only weirdos. Perhaps it was the film's Nietzschean spirit and its call to live deliberately, thoroughly, exuberantly that appealed to the stoned and listless liberal arts students of the '70s, or perhaps it was its satire of the American bourgeoisie and all its institutions — religion, psychology, the family, the military.
Much like a precocious college student, Harold Bud Cort maintains his own sense of self through constant acts of resistance against these authority figures, and appears unable to communicate in the language of groupthink.
He mocks his therapist's psychobabble with silence; his uncle in the army with overenthusiasm; his wealthy mother's conservatism with fake and theatrical acts of self-directed violence. But Harold gladly gives into the authority of Maude Ruth Gordon — a woman who steals hearses, and rescues 'public trees' from smog.
After meeting at a funeral which Harold attends in order to be closer to death, and Maude to be closer to life , the Epicurean older woman soon becomes Harold's lover and mentor. While Harold seems to view life as merely an inconvenient and trivial path towards death, Maude is able to plumb as much meaning from life as death — and she shows Harold how.
Through her love of life, Maude is able to overcome Harold's fascination with death Credit: Alamy. During a walk through a field of daisies, Maude turns to Harold and says: "I should like to change into a sunflower most of all. They're so tall and simple. What flower would you like to be? Look, see. Some are smaller, some are fatter. Some grow to the left, some to the right. Some even have lost some petals. All kinds of observable differences. The camera pans out into an extreme long-shot, as it's revealed that the field of daisies Harold and Maude are standing in is a graveyard — the gravestones identical as daisies from the perspective.
Where other directors may have used a close-up shot to convey feeling, Ashby does the opposite, as he attempts to orient his viewer into an ecological point of view.
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