Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series are proud to present a tribute to the late Bud Cort with a screening of his most famous movie, the offbeat romantic comedy Harold and Maude, on Wednesday, March 25th at 7:30 p.m. at the Laemmle NoHo.
Cort first attracted attention in two films directed by Robert Altman, the Oscar-winning black comic hit M*A*S*H and the eccentric comedy Brewster McCloud. He also played one of the student protestors in The Strawberry Statement, one of a handful of movies about student rebellion produced in the early 1970s. Yet it wasn’t until he joined forces with Ruth Gordon, Oscar-winning co-star of Rosemary’s Baby, to play one of the oddest couples in movie history, that the talented young actor was launched into what would ultimately develop into a decades-long career.
Cort plays Harold, a death-obsessed young man determined to commit suicide, at least until he meets the vibrant 79-year-old Maude and gradually falls in love with her. Before their chance encounter, Harold spends his days staging elaborate fake suicides to shock his wealthy, emotionally distant mother and attending strangers’ funerals for entertainment, drifting through life with a morbid detachment that borders on performance art. Maude, by contrast, lives with mischievous spontaneity: stealing cars she fancies, rescuing trees slated for demolition, and approaching each moment with irreverent wonder. Their unlikely friendship grows (while sneakily developing into the most improbable of romances) through a series of adventures that gently dismantle Harold’s fascination with death, as Maude introduces him to the pleasures, absurdities, and quiet rebellions that make life worth living. Set against a rich backdrop of early-1970s countercultural whimsy, their relationship challenges social expectations and invites Harold (and, ultimately, the audience) to reconsider what it means to truly embrace being alive.
Written by Colin Higgins as the basis for his Master’s thesis at UCLA and directed by Hal Ashby, Harold and Maude was a critical and financial flop when it first opened in December of 1971. Major critics like Roger Ebert, and Vincent Canby of The New York Times, panned the film, and it struggled to find an audience. Pauline Kael gave it a mixed review, noting that it flaunted a bizarre concept, but granted that it had “been made with considerable wit and skill,” also noting the considerable impact it had on young viewers: “Many young moviegoers have returned to this eccentric film repeatedly (in 1974, one 22-year-old claimed to have seen it 138 times).” The venerable New York Review of Books called it “a philosophical black comedy for grandparents and grandchildren.”
It wasn’t until 1983, twelve years after its initial release, that the film finally turned a profit, and that Cort, Gordon, and the filmmakers received their long-overdue royalty checks. In the years that followed, the critics, too, gradually gave the film a second look, and in 1997 it was tagged for preservation by the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. By 2004, Entertainment Weekly ranked it #4 on its list of the top 50 cult films of all time. Rarely has the phrase “aged like fine wine” been a more apt descriptor for a work of art.
Ashby and Higgins, for their part, also went on to much bigger successes, the former directing a number of acclaimed, Oscar-nominated films such as The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound for Glory, Coming Home, and Being There, while the latter penned the smash-hit comedy Silver Streak, starring Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, followed by a successful directorial run with Foul Play and 9 to 5.
With a deep and memorable cast including Vivian Pickles and the prolific Cyril Cusack, as well as an iconic soundtrack by Cat Stevens—filling in admirably for Elton John, who recommended him for the project after dropping out—Harold and Maude has plenty to offer its viewers, whether seeing it for the first… or 139th time.
Join us in remembering Bud Cort, in his most iconic role, at Harold and Maude‘s one-night-only screening at the Laemmle Noho.
