Harold and Maude

4.50
    Harold and Maude
    1971

    Synopsis

    The young Harold lives in his own world of suicide-attempts and funeral visits to avoid the misery of his current family and home environment. Harold meets an 80-year-old woman named Maude who also lives in her own world yet one in which she is having the time of her life. When the two opposites meet they realize that their differences don’t matter and they become best friends and love each other.

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    Cast

    • Ruth GordonDame Marjorie "Maude" Chardin
    • Bud CortHarold Parker Chasen
    • Vivian PicklesMrs. Chasen
    • Cyril CusackGlaucus
    • Charles TynerUncle Victor
    • Ellen GeerSunshine Doré
    • Eric ChristmasPriest
    • G. WoodPsychiatrist
    • Judy EnglesCandy Gulf
    • Shari SummersEdith Phern

    Recommendations

    • 80

      The Guardian

      It's to director Hal Ashby's credit that he succeeds in maintaining an unsettling tone of pre-Lynchian absurdism throughout, while also pulling the viewer into a touching love story between perhaps the most unlikely couple in cinema history.
    • 80

      The A.V. Club

      In the end, Harold And Maude metes out these life lessons directly and without much ambiguity, yet that does little to diminish its power.
    • 80

      IGN

      You may find yourself passing a very enjoyable couple of hours with the oddest of odd couples.
    • 75

      TV Guide Magazine

      This is a doggedly eccentric film which some will reject out of hand. Others will find it profoundly moving and life affirming.
    • 75

      Slant Magazine

      The effortless depiction of their growing camaraderie and unconscious courtship is one of Harold and Maude‘s great charms, as Ashby and screenwriter Colin Higgins transpose fading ideology into boundless truth across a modest framework of pitch-black exposition and glowingly pastoral aesthetic touches.
    • 60

      Time Out

      Ashby forever treads the thin line between whimsy and absurdity and tough sentimentality and black comedy. It is most successful when it keeps to the tone of an insane fairystory set up at the beginning of the movie.
    • 50

      Chicago Reader

      Hal Ashby's 1972 cult film may be simpleminded, but it's fairly inoffensive, at least until Ashby lingers over the concentration-camp serial number tattooed on Gordon's arm. Some things are beyond the reach of whimsy.
    • 50

      Variety

      Director Hal Ashby’s second feature is marked by a few good gags, but marred by a greater preponderance of sophomoric, overdone and mocking humor.

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