Harold and Maude (Classic Film Pick)

In Hal Ashby's 1971 black comedy Bud Court and Ruth Gordon play the coolest oddballs on the planet. Death-obsessed 20-year-old Harold has a proclivity for staging fake suicides to get a rise from his maternally inept but filthy rich mother, when he isn't attending funerals for the fun of it. Maude is an 80-year-old freethinker who coincidentally shares Harold's fancy for memorial services. The pair fall into a romantic relationship that shouts in the face of societal mores as Cat Stevens's uplifting score does for the movie what Simon and Garfunkel did for "The Graduate." If there's one comedy to represent the woof and warp of the early '70s, "Harold and Maude" is it. Spring/December romance never seemed more appropriate.