Harold and Bud: The Pre-Graduate

It’s hard for me to think of Bud Cort as old. When playing a title character in 1971’s Harold and Maude, he was in his early twenties, but (with his small frame,  big blue eyes, and early Beatles haircut) he looked to be maybe seventeen. And, of course, acted on screen like a spoiled teenager, one who hates his life and everyone in it. But now, more than fifty years later, Bud Cort is dead of pneumonia, at the not-so-young age of 77.

 When I was a recent college graduate, Harold and Maude was considered a major film for my generation. Not that the off-beat story of the pairing of youth and age was a commercial hit at the start, The film, written by UCLA film student Colin Higgins and directed by relative newbie Hal Ashby, was almost universally panned by critics and ignored by potential audiences. Gradually, though, it was discovered by young people in rebellion against their elders. Famously it became a cult hit, playing for three straight years in a Minneapolis art-house with a youthful clientele.   

 Why did Harold and Maude prove so attractive to young Americans? I realized, when watching it again after fifty-odd years, that this film has a great deal in common with the hit movie on which I wrote my last book, 1967’s The Graduate. In some ways they’re similar: a youthful leading man, a mistrust of parents; a restless rebellion against what seems like a bleak future. On the other hand, there are ways in which the two films couldn’t be more opposite. As my Seduced by Mrs. Robinson points out, recent Ivy League graduate Benjamin Braddock is a star student, a star athlete, and a Big Man on  Campus. Back home in Beverly Hills,  he’s his parents’ trophy son. Bursting with pride about his achievements, they give him expensive presents (a sportscar, a diving suit) and don’t intrude when he chooses to spend his summer lounging in the swimming pool (and in Mrs. Robinson’s bed).

 Harold, by contrast, has done nothing for his mother to brag about. (His father seems to be totally missing in action.) His very wealthy mom, played by a screen veteran with the wonderful name of Vivian Pickles, seems bent on ignoring him, so caught up is she with her salon appointments and social events. When she decides that an early marriage might cure what ails him, she insists on filling out the dating survey herself, in his name. Maybe that’s why Harold keeps coming up with increasingly gruesome ways of feigning suicide. He also attends many a stranger’s funeral . . . and that’s where he finds someone with similar tastes, almost-eighty-year-old Maude (the great Ruth Gordon).

 Despite her appreciation for a good funeral, Maude is hardly as gloomy as Harold. Instead she’s a true life force, someone who poses in the nude for artists and steals cars for fun. In her presence, Harold discovers joy, though his “Elaine” is a great deal older than Benjamin Braddock’s. All of which leads to an ending that seems surprising, but (given a few hints of Maude’s backstory) perhaps not entirely illogical. No, Harold and Maude don’t end up together on a bus, à la Ben and his beloved, but—for the young people who made this film and the young people who watched it—it still seems an ending filled with optimism and love. (And, of course, a rejection of anything to do with President Nixon and the U.S. military establishment, representing a world that the youth of my generation hardly wanted to celebrate.)