Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude
A one-night-only TIFF Cinematheque Special Screening of Hal Ashby's outrageous black comedy and beloved cult classic.
Taking the '60s-style celebration of kooky, anti-Establishment outsiders to extremes, Harold & Maude recounts the blooming relationship between the title twosome, a 20-year-old child of privilege (Bud Cort) who revolts against his castrating mother by staging elaborate fake suicides, and an 80-year-old free spirit (Ruth Gordon) who teaches the macabre lad to live for the moment.
Set to a Cat Stevens soundtrack and ping-ponging in tone between far-out fairy tale, sly social satire and moving love story, H&M is "a film that could have only been made in the direct wake of the Summer of Love … one last gasp of earnest, sincere faith in the interconnectedness and perseverance of mankind before New Hollywood would be swallowed whole by the bleak realities of [the era]" (Jordan Cronk, Slant Magazine).
