Thursday, October 11 | 8 pm
Twenty year-old Harold (Bud Cort) is obsessed with death: he attends strangers’ funerals, drives a hearse, and stages elaborate fake suicides—all to the displeasure of his wealthy mother. At one of the funerals, Harold meets fun-loving and free-spirited seventy-nine-year-old Maude (Ruth Gordon), and the two strike up a close friendship that blossoms into forbidden romance. Despite his mother’s insistence on hand-picking a series of wife candidates, Harold chooses to wed his much older soulmate. Initially a commercial and critical disappointment for iconic countercultural filmmaker Hal Ashby, Harold and Maude has since become an all-time cult classic, renowned for its deft pairing of gallows humor and romantic innocence; its existentialist subject matter; and of course, for its legendary Cat Stevens soundtrack, capped by one the musician’s most beloved songs, “If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out.”
Director Hal Ashby | 1971 | In English | 91 minutes | PG | DCP
