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Harold and Maude (DVD)
by GentleGenius
RELEASED: 1971, Cert. 15
RUNNING TIME: Approx 90 mins
DIRECTOR: Hal Ashby
PRODUCERS: Colin Higgins & Charles B Mulvehill
SCREENPLAY: Colin Higgins
MUSIC: Cat Stevens
MAIN CAST:-
Bud Cort as Harold
Ruth Gordon as Maude
Vivian Pickles as ... Harold's mother
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FILM ONLY REVIEW
Harold is a young man from a very wealthy background who seems bored and depressed...hardly surprising bearing in mind his awful mother who he lives with.
Harold has a couple of hobbies....one is attending random funerals and the other is engineering some initially very convincing fake suicides, no doubt in a vain attempt at trying to inspire some sort of connected reaction from his cold, superficial, snobbish mother.
His psychotherapy sessions appear to be going nowhere, and one day a breath of fresh air floats into his life in the form of Maude, a delightfully rebellious elderly lady who he meets whilst attending one of his many funerals.
Harold and Maude make good friends with one another, and the more time they spend together, the more open Harold becomes as Maude introduces him to a completely different way of looking at and living life.
That sets the scene!
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Harold And Maude is one of those films I'd heard a lot about, yet have only recently taken the plunge into seeing for myself. It does seem to have been dusted down from the annals of the past and given some sort of cult status in more recent years.
On watching Harold And Maude for the first time yesterday evening, I immediately eased myself back into the comfort zone of 1971 with the view to hopefully seeing the film in its contextual time-scale. That perhaps was a bit of a mistake, because the part of the film which happens before Harold meets Maude struck me that it could come from any era.
Once Harold and the delightful Maude form a friendship and she introduces him to all sorts of things he'd previously been unaware of - and no doubt would never have become aware of without her influence in his life - it did feel more like something from its own era....only a little though.
Harold And Maude is supposed to be a comedy, but there was very little I found amusing about it. I'm tempted to say I found it light-hearted rather than funny, but philosophically it struck me as being very serious.
As far as the acting is concerned, I found Bud Cort and Vivian Pickles to be at least adequate, but nothing all that special. The character who stood out most for me, far up and above anybody else, was Ruth Gordon as the very charming, almost anarchical, free-spirited Maude. It is true to say that her way of speaking in this film, plus various of her little idiosyncrasies, are identical to that which she played in her role of Minnie Castevet in Rosemary's Baby five years earlier, but there's no doubt she put an awful lot into the part of Maude and I found her extremely endearing.
The music to Harold And Maude is right up my street....composed and sung by Cat Stevens, a little of which appears on his Teaser And The Firecat album. Cat Stevens is one of my most enshrined musical icons, and it pleased me to hear his work used as part of this film.
Harold And Maude is very much - also bearing in mind it was released in 1971 - climbing up on the back of the old hippie ideals, yet to me it came across in this film that such philosophy was being toned down quite a lot, perhaps as an attempt to make it palatable to the older generation and the younger 'straights' of the era....kind of like sugaring the medicine to make it easier to swallow for certain doubting Thomases of hippie ideology.
The way the film was put together perhaps comes across with more of the quality of a play rather than a blockbuster movie, which is fine by me and I don't have a problem with that, but the whole thing did strike me as being a little bit too twee. Despite loving Ruth Gordon's portrayal of the wonderful Maude being utterly superb - making me sort of resolve to be like that myself in about twenty years or so when I reach the age she is supposed to be in the film - the parts of Harold And Maude I enjoyed most were Harold's rather stunning suicide mock-ups and his mother's reaction (or non-reaction) to them. It wasn't clear to me whether his mother simply didn't care, or she was so used to her son's antics being of a 'cry wolf' nature, that she'd come to a point where she merely ignored them....or, maybe a bit of both. The most amusing part of the film for me was the little pep talk which Harold's family priest gave to him in a vain attempt at pulling the boy out of what is perceived to be his torpor.
Overall, I can say that I did enjoy Harold And Maude, but it didn't quite live up to what I was anticipating, after having read various rave reviews on it. I found it less amusing than a lot of other people seem to have done, and for me the message of freedom was put across in a way which I feel is too dressed up in pretty ribbons to make any serious, deep and lasting impact. I feel sure that if the message within the film and the way it is there presented would have made any kind of en masse global mark, then the ideology of that era would have stuck and we'd now in the 21st century be living out that dream, rather than each day moving further and further away from it....but, there's no doubt that Harold And Maude is quite heartwarming and Maude is a pretty admirable woman, but for me the feel of its essence is more 'cute' than anything else and its thought-provoking properties didn't stir anything new inside of my mind.
I'd say that most of Harold And Maude could be suitable family entertainment, but what stops it being so is Harold's bizarre fake suicides, which are quite graphic, therefore possibly rendering those parts of the film a bit of a no-go area for children.
In summary, I would recommend Harold And Maude, but I do feel it has become a bit over-hyped, and ultimately is probably something more to be admired for Ruth Gordon's portrayal of Maude than anything else.
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At the time of writing, Harold And Maude can be purchased from Amazon as follows:-
New: from £2.58 to £39.99
Used: from £1.74 to £7.95
A delivery charge of £1.26 should be added to the above figures.
Thanks for reading!
~~ Also published on Ciao under my CelticSoulSister user name ~~
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Dirty Harry (Clint Eastwood Collection, DVD)
by Jake Speed
1971's Dirty Harry was directed by Don Siegel and written by Harry Julian Fink, RM Fink and Dean Reisner with additional input by John Milius. Milius is credited with coming up with some of the most famous and iconic dialogue flourishes including the most oft-quoted line of all during the bank robbery street sequence. This is the best ... film in the "Dirty Harry" series and the one that feels the most downbeat and serious - the series becoming increasingly parodic and knowing as it went on. Dirty Harry is a violent and seminal police thriller with stylish direction and an eerie psychedelic jazz score by Lalo Schifrin that proves to be a great compliment to the extensive San Francisco locations. Lot of wonderful swooping helicopter shots in this film that not only show you the city but emphasise the lonesome image of Callahan as a man who stands apart and alone. Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood obviously) is an Inspector with the San Francisco Police Homicide Department and has earned the soubriquet "Dirty" Harry for reasons that are never completely clarified but seem to be because he gets all the tasks no one else wants to do. "No wonder they call him Dirty Harry; he always gets the s**t end of the stick." The monosyllabic and sarcastic Callahan is considered to have what you could term anti-social and politically incorrect attitudes by his bosses and is known as a man who shoots first and worries about the consequences later. This is liberal hippy trippy San Francisco but Harry thinks that bureaucracy has got out of control and the courts are too soft on criminals and not thinking about the victims enough. Callahan's unconventional (and brutal) methods and the ability of his exasperated bosses to control him are about to be put to the test though in severe fashion.
A very nasty and oleaginous psychopathic serial killer known as Scorpio (Andrew Robinson) murders a young woman in a swimming pool using a high powered telescopic rifle from a rooftop and demands a huge ransom be paid or the city will suffer more murders. A vicious game of cat and mouse between Callahan and Scorpio unfolds with Harry often feeling like he is battling city red tape and legal procedures as much as he is the killer. "Where does it say you've got the right to kick down doors, torture suspects, deny medical attention and legal counsel?" Dirty Harry is of course a role that Clint Eastwood was born to play but like many famous pictures it was all a fortuitous accident. The film was written with John Wayne in mind but he decided that Harry Callahan was the type of character he'd played far too often (a decision he later deeply regretted when he saw how successful the film was). Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, Steve McQueen and Paul Newman all turned the film down before Frank Sinatra was cast as Callahan but bailed out when he hurt his hand filming The Manchurian Candidate and decided he wanted to do something lighter anyway. Warner Brothers then turned to laconic Spaghetti Western star Clint Eastwood and he agreed to take the role so long as his friend Don Siegel (with whom he'd just made The Beguiled) could direct and that the location of the film was switched from New York to San Francisco. Eastwood had no qualms about the controversial nature of the story and believed the film wasn't about the moral ambiguity of the legal system or the avocation of vigilantism but about a society that tolerates violence in the first place. Mitchum and Lancaster and a few others had considered the story to be rather distasteful so Eastwood wasn't exactly in the majority amongst his fellow actors when it came to the moral compass of the film.
Eastwood's casting and the addition of Siegel in the director's chair turned Dirty Harry in into a different kind of film altogether. A sleek, modern (for 1971 anyway), ultra violent kinetic cops and robbers thriller with a moody, sometimes surreal atmosphere and a fantastic villain. "Hear me, you old hag, I'm telling you to drive or I'll decorate this bus with your brains!" snaps Scorpio to the meek driver of a school bus he's hijacked! You genuinely want Eastwood to blow him away long before the film ends. Robinson (who was brilliant by the way much later as Garek in the television series Deep Space Nine) is the ultimate slimeball here. Just a really horrible and repellent villain who makes you want to take a bath each time he's onscreen. His performance is maybe a little over the top but he's great. The scenes between him and Eastwood as they build to their climactic showdown are compelling - especially a great bit at a football stadium where the lights come on and Siegel pans back (the big pan back seems to be a Siegel signature) to emphasise the gravity of Scorpio's situation - trapped in this deserted nowhere to hide location with the no nonsense Callahan. The subtext here is that Harry and Scorpio are flip sides of one another. Both are renegades and misanthropic but Harry has a moral compass and Scorpio doesn't. Scorpio wants to kill everyone while Harry just wants to kill criminals. Eastwood is the ultimate alpha male here and draws on his strong but silent line of Western heroes. You don't really learn anything about Harry aside from the fact that he was married once and his wife was killed. He's the mysterious loner cleaning up the town with methods as brutal as the criminals he is after. It's safe to say that a version of Dirty Harry with a 55 year-old Frank Sinatra in the lead probably wouldn't have been an iconic film. It would have been diluted down and probably forgotten now.
I think the moment where Eastwood cements Callahan as an iconic character comes when he is having a hot dog for his lunch and becomes aware that a bank robbery is taking place across the street. He calls for back up but eventually decides he has to intervene, sauntering across the street with his Magnum, still eating his hot dog (!), and eventually getting to deliver one of the most famous speeches in cinema. "I know what you're thinking. Did he fire six shots or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I've kinda lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?" Great bit where the gun fight result in a fire hydrant spewing water into the air as we pan back on a street scene. It's rather comic book and fun. Although this film has the most grit and melancholia - not to mention lashings of sadism and violence - it is funny at times I think and not just because of Eastwood's little asides muttered under his breath. Shoot outs in supermarkets almost reach Naked Gun levels of preposterousness with the proximity of the adversaries to one another. I think the controversial nature of the film has dimmed with the passage of time and almost seems innocuous now. Part of the reason is the slew of Dirty Harry copycats that followed, picking up on the theme of the maverick policeman who plays by his own rules and doesn't have much time for legal niceties or his superiors. Dirty Harry still stacks up very well in the pantheon of Hollywood police thrillers and remains a highly entertaining and stylish film.
There are no special features with this (aside from scene selection, subtitles, widescreen etc) but it's not bad if you just want the film and under a fiver (at the time of writing). If you want loads of extras you should pick one of the Dirty Harry box sets. They are pretty good and often available at a very reasonable price.
Read the complete review |
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