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.
