editors:
laura berman
dan borus
contributing editor:
mary long

inside:

sundaiy

mctgazrne

page four-books
page five-movies
page six-week in
review

Number 23 Page Three Ap

ril 6, 1975

FEATURES


Harold
campus

and
cuh

Maude's
F status:

The

triumph

of

trash
e years ago, it

When 'Harold and Maude' first opened thre

died a quiet death. But then it re-opened and the lines ex-
tended down the block. It was supposedly a joy-ride of a
movie-loaded with idealism and intoxicating music, exul-
tation in life and insistence on freedom. But this critic, at least,
views'Maude' as a mirror of our decline in values.

By NEAL GABLER
WHEN I FIRST saw Harold and
Maude three years ago it hard-
ly seemed a candidate for cultish
deification. My own expectations
had been jacked slightly because I
liked The Landlord, director Hal
Ashby's first feature; that film had
all sorts of lumps, but it also had a
very human, if somewhat oddball,
sensibility, and the blend of realism
with wacky exaggeration was in-
teresting and occasionally more. On
the night I saw Maude, hiy fellow
moviegoers, what few there were at
the Campus Theater, apparently
had no such expectations; they
rode with the film a short way, got
off, turned hostile, hissed and
grumped, then groused on the way
out the way people grouse when
they feel they've wasted a few
bucks. Me too, though it will prob-
ably offend many of you to hear
me say so: Maude is as ugly, wit-
less and incompetently made a
film as I've seen. If this sounds like
crabby hyperbole, rest assured it
isn't. Only the music, by Cat Stev-
ens, is intoxicating, and that only
if you hadn't listened to the words.
(I hadn't until just recently --
some tripe about being free). The
critics panned it, its runs were
brief, and it died a quiet death
having grossed only $1.1 million
(according to Variety) a full year
after its release. Ashes to ashes and
trash to the trash heap. But that
was all before some clever adman
resurrected it, dubbed it a cult film
(which, as the ads have it, means
that somebody in Minneapolis or
Boston has seen it fifty times) and

turned out the college crowds. Has
our taste really descended so low?
Maude offends in a considerable
number of ways: but some of its of-
fenses are more obvious than oth-
ers because we're subjected to them
constantly. Bud Cort, whose per-
formance as Harold (a role tailor-
made for psycho Anthony Perkins)
recalls amateur night, emotes in
two gears: sensitive and sinister.
We can tell when he's sensitive be-
cause his lips quiver and he talks
softly about being unhappy or lov-A
ing Maude. We can tell when he's
sinister because after some partic-
ularly savage piece of business he
rolls his eyes, rotates his baby face
toward the camera, and smirks.
Some people laugh. Ruth Gordon
as Maude really plays Ruth Gordon
again for the umpteenth time. She
shakes steadily, nods her head
quite a bit, and even jerks occa-
sionally like one of Galvani's frog-
legs; what in another old person
would indicate palsy evidently in-
dicates life in Maude. John Alon-
zo's photography (he did China-
town) has improved considerably
since he lensed Maude; here his
images are pasty and unpleasant.
And Hal Ashby's compositions are
undistinguished and entirely for-
gettable despite some arsty-craft-
sy attempts to be artful: the open-
ing low angles of Harold's feet; a
zoom out from a cemetery show-
ing hundreds of neat, tiny, white
crosses; several Semi Obligatory
Lyrical Interludes with romps
through the park while Cat Stevens
sings.

T ESS OBVIOUS but more import-
ant, Maude is a structural mess
in three movements with motifs re-
peated continually like military
torture until we are clobbered into
submission or nausea sets in. Part
One: Harold is neglected (often).
Part Two: Maude is a character
(more often). Part Three: Maude
can make neglected Harold a char-
acter too. In actual practice, Har-
old is a rich twenty year-old misfit
who gets satisfaction by feigning
suicide, attending funerals, baiting
his mother, and generally being
nasty in an introverted sort of way.
His mother, meanwhile, fusses and
scolds, signs him up with a cam-
puter dating service, buys him a
car (which he "customizes" into
a hearse), and enlists him for the
army to build his character. Maude
is a 79-year-old Life Force who
runs around twitching and stealing
things and generally being nasty
in an extroxerted sort of way. Har-
old and Maude meet (at a funeral),
join forces, make love (!). Then
she dies, on her eightieth birthday
just as she'd planned but not be-
fore getting serious and delivering
a string of aphorisms (e.g.-Live!').
At the end Harold, newly commit-
ted to life, stands on a cliff and
strums a banjo while the credits
glide by and Cat Stevens sings
again about being free. I swear I'm
telling the truth.
WCHILE IT IS EASY to be con-
temptuous of Maude, as I am,
and reckon it among the five or
six worst films ever made, as I do,
one can't deny Maude's new cam-
pus popularity and even cult status.
As I recall, back at the time of
Maude's release if someone men-
tioned a cult film chances are he
meant a nostalgic piece with Bo-
gart or Dean, or anaesthetic novel-
ty like 2001 or El Topo, or a Marx
Brothers comedy. Each sub-cultish
film performed its function. The
nostalgic films provided t h e
heroes, romance, excitement, and
conventional plotting that new
films were shucking. The aesthetic
novelties provided those visual
thrills the old films didn't deliver,
thrills often intensified by drugs,
the object being to reach new
realms. The Marx Brothers, array-
ed against the puffed up and pre-
tentious, provided a congenial
spirit of deflation, at their tamest,
and destruction ,at their wildest.
But Harold and Maude, though It
borrows certainthings from other
cults, runs with a new hack of
hounds: King of Hearts, The Rul-
ing Class, Brewster McCloud, 0
Lucky Man (which, I susnect,
would be a gigantic cult film if it
weren't so damn long).

Daily Photo by SUE SHEINER

in its art. What is new are the
values themselves.
If Maude is the mirror, what
does it tell us about our values,
about how we would like to see our-
selves? The image is flattering on
the surface. First, as the plot sy-
nopsis suggests, we are funky and
offbeat. We make fun of death, put
down materialism, do wild things,
make love with people we like even
if they happen to be eighty years
old, and thumb our noses at so-
ciety. Second, we are the great
moral force of America - good
screwballs - which is why Maude
may sound rather familiar under-
neath its funk. Take away the
age differential - a gimmick -
and the bald obsession with death,
take away the downer near the end
and you've got yourself a screw-
ball comedy, which is exactly what
Maude is in head, if not at heart.
With allowanve for oversimplifica-
tion, the formula is fairly simple.
Like most of the old screwball
comedies of the 30s Maude posits
an old order: success-driven and
often upper class, or urban, or
both. Whether one calls it com-
mercial or civilized, or, in its moral

A S A SCREWBALL COMEDY
Maude gives lip service to these
values; it has to. But there is some
other, darker mechanism at work
in the film, something ugly and al-
most pathological, which also con-
nects up to how we want to see
ourselves: in its' reformulation
Maude is both a measure of the
change in values from the 30s myth
to the 70s myth, and an object les-
son in the contradiction of fitting
our gloomier sensibility into an
older, more optimistic mold. As
I've indicated, in the 30s the con-
flict between spontaneity and
strait - laced propriety usually
raged along class or geographic
lines - haves vs. have less, city
nonsense vs. rural good sense --
and sometimes along no lines at all
save the difference in conscious-
ness (Bringing Up .Baby). In
Frank Capra's You Can't Take It
With You (the title tells you every-
thing you need to know), old
Grandpa Vanderhof's comfortable.
middle-class existence is pitted fa-
vorably against the ulcerous upper-
class existence of business mogul
Anthony Kirby. Vanderhof was
once a successful businessman but

'Maude' sets of f vicarious thrills in an audience
absolutely convinced of its impotence. That's one
reason why the film seems so cynical and pessi-
mistic even though it's constantly coming on with
slogans of how great it is to be alive. We don't

up a few rungs), one can't change
his generation, though people often
make fools of themselves trying.
Nor, since the new consciousness
follows age, can anyone of middle
age make covenant with the coun-
terculture even if he's willing to
adopt its whole mindset. You're
NOT as young as you feel, though,
paradoxically, certain young folks
can be disenfranchised, as Harold's
dates are, for being square and
silly. It's no wonder the film ap-
peals almost exclusively to self-
congratulatory college students
who see themselves as hip. But, in-
terestingly, Maude, like Harry and
Tonto, exempts one group of adults
from its ban: the elderly. These
folks, with their Consciousness I,
have recently become the allies of
the young. Like us they are not in
control. Like us they've been ig-
nored by the Con II people who do
control. Like us they have no in-
tention of joining the rat race
some of them have only recently
escaped. And like us they eschew
all the materialist crap of their
children, our parents. Or so the
romance goes. The ends ,natural
allies, unite against the middle,
common enemy.
ANOTHER SIGNIFICANT
and rather vicious departure
from the old screwball values fol-
lows from the generational divi-
sion. In the 30s a high premium
was placed on the reconciliation of
old with new. Though adherents to
the old order occasionally came
close to being evil, they were gen-
erally nothing more than misguid-
ed or repressed; once their eyes
were opened they often followed
the righteous path. By the time of
Maude, however, the old order has
burrowed so deep, is so firmly en-
trenched, that there seems no way
to dispossess it of America; at least
that's what Maude seems to say.
Conversion is no longer possible
because the enemies list has ex-
panded beyond a few pompous,
misguided souls to include every
person between the ends of yound
and old. More than making them
enemies, all these new cult films
pander to youth by. making every-
one fools, boobs, morons, cretins
-except us.
One can ridicule and punish im-
beciles -- Maude .does -- but one
can't come to any accommodation
with them. Grandpa Vanderhof ex-
tends his hand to the opposition,
hoping to pull it over to his side, to
show it that life is its own reward.


believe it and neither does the film. The
funeral Harold attends will be Maude's.

next

variant, puritanical and genteel,
this is the order which controls
America. And like those screwball
comedies Maude also posits a new,
or possibly preindustrially rooted,
rebelliousness: spontaneous a n d
often lower middle class, or small
town, or both. This, of course, is
theorder of Eros, of spirituality, of
genuine humanity, of love - our
order. And in Maude the two come
into conflict.
In the 30s the two forces strug-
gled and the new spirit either con-
verted the old one, topnled it from
power or jimmied open a crack
by uniting in marriage an old-
order scion with a renresentative of

ditched it. Kirby wants more and
more because he's been schooled
that way. What's important,
though, is that mobility is possible.
Just as anyone of any class and
location can dedicate himself to
Kirby's values (the business ethic)
so too can he dedicate himself to
Vanderhof's, to life. No one has a
patent on the potion.
This is not so in Maude's meaner
screwball reformulation because
the values, with kiddish gloating,
are sliced off from class and en-
vironment and moored instead to
age. Or, in the ancient terminology
of counterculture theoretician

While it's easy to be contemptuous of 'Maude,'
as I am, and reckon it among the five or six
worst films ever made, as I do, one can't deny


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