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| Category | Details |
|---|---|
| MPAA Rating | PG (thematic elements; originally rated GP, the pre-PG designation) |
| Common Sense Media | Age 13+ |
| IMDB Parents Guide | Moderate (suicide themes, dark humor); Mild (everything else) |
| Setting | San Francisco Bay Area, California; early 1970s |
| Language | English |
| Awards | Golden Globe nominations for Best Picture—Musical or Comedy and Best Actress (Ruth Gordon); selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1997; Criterion Collection edition released 2012 |
| Note | One of cinema’s greatest underdog stories. The screenplay was UCLA film student Colin Higgins’ master’s thesis. Higgins was working as a pool boy for producers Edward and Mildred Lewis, and told the story to their daughter while driving her to school. She told her mother, who told her husband, who sold it to Paramount. Higgins wanted to direct but was deemed not ready; Hal Ashby took the job on the condition that Higgins approved and stayed on set as co-producer to learn filmmaking. Paramount released the film on December 20, 1971—the date originally planned for The Godfather‘s premiere—with almost no marketing. It flopped spectacularly. Roger Ebert gave it one and a half stars. Vincent Canby called it “creepy.” The film was completely ignored by the Academy. Then something remarkable happened. It refused to die. It played midnight screenings, college campuses, and repertory theaters for years. In one Minneapolis theater, it ran for 114 consecutive weeks. A man reportedly put himself through college by renting and screening the film for fellow students. By 1983, it had finally turned a profit. Today it is considered one of the greatest American comedies ever made. The stage adaptation, translated into French by Jean-Claude Carrière, has been performed in over 70 countries. Higgins, who was openly gay, died of AIDS-related complications in 1988 at age 47. Ashby, who struggled with addiction, died in 1988 at age 59. Cat Stevens (now Yusuf Islam) initially wasn’t approached for the soundtrack—Elton John was. John passed and suggested his friend Cat Stevens instead. The music became inseparable from the film. |
The first thing Harold does in the film is hang himself.
We watch from behind his mother’s back as she walks through their enormous house, dictating to a secretary, managing her social calendar, and entering the drawing room to find her twenty-year-old son dangling from a noose. She barely pauses. She notes the time, mentions she’ll be late for her appointment, and walks out. Harold climbs down.
This is not a suicide. It’s a performance. Harold stages elaborate fake suicides—hanging, drowning, self-immolation, wrist-cutting, seppuku—with increasing theatrical ambition, and the joke is that no one responds. Not his mother, who is too absorbed in her own social machinery to register genuine distress. Not the parade of computer-matched blind dates his mother arranges, who are merely horrified and flee. Not the psychiatrist, the priest, or the military uncle who are deployed to fix him. Harold’s fake deaths are the loudest possible scream from inside a life where no one is listening.
Harold is rich, young, white, privileged, and completely empty. He lives in a mansion. He has no friends. He has no interests except death—he drives a hearse he’s customized from a Jaguar, and his only hobby is attending the funerals of strangers. He sits in the back pews and watches people grieve, and he finds in their grief something he recognizes: evidence that life has meaning, that loss is real, that someone somewhere actually feels something. Harold wants to feel something. He just doesn’t know how.
At one of these funerals, he notices an old woman who also appears to be attending the funeral of someone she didn’t know. Her name is Maude. She is seventy-nine years old. She is about to turn eighty.
Maude lives in a decommissioned railroad car filled with art, music, plants, and stolen property. She steals cars the way other people borrow books—casually, without malice, because she needs them and they’re there. She uproots ailing city trees and replants them in forests. She sculpts, plays banjo, dances, talks to strangers, and breaks every law she encounters not out of rebellion but out of a philosophical conviction that most rules exist to contain life rather than protect it. She is radiant, irreverent, fully alive, and completely uninterested in being appropriate.
She takes Harold to a junkyard and shows him how machines are demolished. She takes him to her railroad car and teaches him to play banjo. She takes him to a field of daisies and delivers the film’s most famous reflection—about how each daisy is unique but how most people get treated like they’re all the same—and you can see something shift behind Harold’s eyes. Not a conversion. A crack. Light getting in through a space that wasn’t there before.
As Harold and Maude grow closer, their friendship becomes a romance. The film never flinches from this—a twenty-year-old man and a seventy-nine-year-old woman falling in love—and it never asks you to find it disgusting or titillating. It presents their connection as what it is: two people who recognize each other across every possible barrier. Harold announces he intends to marry Maude. His mother, psychiatrist, priest, and uncle all react with variations of horror. The film finds their revulsion funnier than the relationship.
Then comes the revelation that reframes everything. Harold takes Maude’s hand and notices a number tattooed on her forearm. A concentration camp number. The film doesn’t explain it. It doesn’t need to. In a single visual moment, Maude’s entire philosophy rearranges itself: her joy is not naivety. Her embrace of life is not eccentricity. Her refusal to follow rules, her insistence on beauty, her theft of cars and trees and moments—all of it is the hard-won wisdom of a woman who has seen the absolute worst that human beings can do to each other and has chosen, deliberately and with full knowledge, to love life anyway.
On her eightieth birthday, Harold throws Maude a party. They dance. She tells him she couldn’t imagine a lovelier farewell. Harold doesn’t understand—then he does. Maude has taken an overdose of pills. She has always planned to die on her eightieth birthday. She told him twice, early in the film, and he didn’t hear it. We didn’t hear it either.
Harold rushes her to the hospital. It’s too late. Maude dies.
The film’s final sequence shows Harold driving his hearse-Jaguar toward a cliff at high speed. The car sails over the edge and crashes on the rocks below. The camera holds. Then it pans up, and there is Harold, standing at the top of the cliff with Maude’s banjo. He didn’t go over with it. He let the car go—the hearse, the death machine, the vehicle of his obsession—and he kept the instrument. He begins to play, walking away into his life.
Language: Mild. Minimal profanity. The humor is situational and character-based rather than verbal. Context: “The PG rating is accurate for language. The film’s comedy is one of the cleanest in the curriculum—it derives its shock from situations, not words.”
Violence: Moderate thematic violence. Harold’s fake suicides are staged with theatrical blood and props—hanging, self-immolation, slitting wrists, stabbing, hara-kiri, drowning. All are performed for shock effect and played for dark comedy. No actual violence occurs between characters. Context: “The fake suicides are the film’s most challenging content for parents. They are deliberately excessive and absurd—Harold stages them as performances, and the film makes clear they are performances. However, for any student with personal experience of suicidal ideation or self-harm, these scenes require careful framing. The film is not cavalier about suicide—Maude’s actual death is treated with devastating seriousness. The contrast between Harold’s fake deaths and Maude’s real one is the entire point. But parents should preview the film and assess their child’s readiness for this particular brand of dark humor.”
Sexual Content: Implied sexual relationship between Harold and Maude—nothing is shown. The original love scene was cut by Paramount but Ashby sneaked it into the trailer as an act of defiance. References to computer dating. Context: “The age gap is the element that provokes the strongest reaction. The film handles it with remarkable grace—the relationship is presented as genuine, tender, and fundamentally about two souls recognizing each other. For students aged 16+, the discomfort the relationship provokes is itself a valuable discussion topic: why does this bother us? What assumptions does it challenge?”
Substance Use: Characters share what appears to be marijuana in one scene. Social drinking. Context: “Brief and incidental. The drug use reflects the 1970s setting.”
Mature Themes: Suicide (both fake and real), death, the Holocaust (implied through the tattoo), aging, existential emptiness, the meaning of life, parental neglect, institutional failure (psychiatry, religion, and military all fail Harold), chosen death versus fear of death. Context: “This is the most thematically intense film in the Objective #27 lineup. It deals directly with death—not as abstraction but as the central fact of existence—and argues that the proper response to mortality is not dread but full engagement with life. For students who have worked through this curriculum’s earlier objectives on emotional intelligence, critical thinking, and moral courage, the themes will land with appropriate weight. For students currently struggling with depression or suicidal thoughts, parents should preview the film and consider whether the timing is right. The film’s message is profoundly life-affirming, but it reaches that affirmation through darkness.”
Harold and Maude is the final film in Objective #27 because it is the one that earns its philosophy through suffering.
Every other film in this lineup teaches authentic happiness from a position of relative safety. Groundhog Day uses a fantastical premise. Little Miss Sunshine uses a dysfunctional family comedy. Amélie uses a fairy tale. Big Fish uses tall tales. Even The Grand Budapest Hotel, which engages directly with fascism and death, maintains an aesthetic distance through Anderson’s visual formalism. These are all great films. They all deliver genuine insights. But none of them places a Holocaust survivor at the center of the argument.
Maude has been inside the machinery of death. She has seen—and the film trusts us to understand what she has seen without showing it—the systematic destruction of human beings by other human beings. She has every reason to be destroyed by this. She has every reason to be bitter, withdrawn, fearful, or numb. Instead, she steals cars and plants trees and plays banjo and falls in love with a boy who is play-acting at death because he doesn’t know what the real thing looks like.
This is the curriculum’s ultimate statement about authentic happiness: it is not the absence of suffering. It is what survives suffering. It is not optimism—Maude is not optimistic. She knows exactly what the world is capable of. It is not denial—she has the tattoo on her arm to prove she has looked directly at the worst. It is a choice—the most difficult choice a human being can make—to love life knowing that life includes Auschwitz. To find beauty knowing that beauty can be destroyed. To plant a tree knowing that someone will come along and cut it down.
Harold’s journey from death-obsession to life is the film’s narrative. But Maude’s presence is its argument. She doesn’t teach Harold through lectures. She teaches him through demonstration—by being fully alive in front of him, by treating every moment as unrepeatable, by refusing the categories and rules and expectations that Harold’s world uses to keep people contained. She is the film’s answer to the question Harold has been asking with every fake suicide: does life mean anything?
Yes, Maude says. It means everything. And it ends.
The humor in the film operates on two levels simultaneously. On the surface, it’s the blackest of comedies—a boy who fakes elaborate suicides and falls in love with a woman sixty years his senior. The absurdity is the comedy. But underneath, the humor serves the same function it serves in The Grand Budapest Hotel and Jojo Rabbit: it is resistance. Harold’s fake suicides are funny because they expose the emptiness of the institutions that are supposed to help him—his mother’s obliviousness, the psychiatrist’s uselessness, the priest’s revulsion, the military’s bloodlust. Maude’s lawbreaking is funny because it exposes the arbitrariness of rules that serve property rather than people. The humor doesn’t minimize the darkness. It illuminates it.
For sixteen-year-olds completing this objective, Harold and Maude delivers the final lesson: authentic happiness is not a feeling. It is a practice. It is what you do with your one life knowing that it will end. It is learning to play the banjo after the car goes over the cliff.
Harold Chasen begins the film as a void. Bud Cort plays him with a stillness so complete it’s almost hypnotic—round eyes, dropped mouth, a body that seems to be waiting for instructions from a brain that has stopped sending them. Harold’s fake suicides are the only thing that makes him feel alive, and they don’t even do that anymore—they’ve become routine, another performance in a life made entirely of performances. His mother performs wealth. His psychiatrist performs concern. His priest performs morality. Harold performs death. Nobody in this world is actually present.
What Cort does so brilliantly is show us the moments when Maude’s presence begins to thaw Harold—not in dramatic breakthroughs but in tiny shifts. A flicker of curiosity. A half-smile. The first time he laughs without planning to. By the film’s end, the boy who drove a hearse and staged hangings is playing banjo on a clifftop, and the transformation doesn’t feel forced because Cort has shown us every incremental step.
Maude is Ruth Gordon’s masterwork—a performance so vital that it’s easy to miss its complexity. On the surface, Maude is a free spirit, a rule-breaker, a life force. She steals, she trespasses, she says whatever she thinks. She could easily become a cliché—the Manic Pixie Dream Grandmother. But Gordon gives her a gravity beneath the sparkle. When Maude falls silent, you feel the weight of what she’s not saying. When she touches the tattoo on her arm (the film never calls attention to it—it’s simply there), you understand that her joy is not innocence. It is the hardest thing she has ever achieved.
Gordon was 75 during filming—not quite Maude’s 79, but close enough for the performance to carry physical truth. She couldn’t drive in real life, which makes the car-stealing scenes even more remarkable. Her Maude is the culmination of a career that included an Oscar for Rosemary’s Baby and decades of stage work: a performer who understood that the most important moments in acting are the ones between the words.
Mrs. Chasen (Vivian Pickles) is the film’s sharpest satire. Harold’s mother is not malicious—she’s absent. She fills out computer dating questionnaires on Harold’s behalf without consulting him, choosing answers that describe the son she wants rather than the son she has. She responds to his fake suicides with irritation rather than concern. She represents every institution in the film: present in body, absent in attention, going through the motions of care without any of the substance. Pickles flew in her own clothes from England and chose antique jewelry from the costume designer’s mother’s collection—details that give Mrs. Chasen her precise, immaculate, emotionally sterile quality.
The authorities — the psychiatrist, the priest, Uncle Victor — form a chorus of institutional failure. The psychiatrist asks how Harold feels about his mother while missing everything important. The priest expresses disgust at Harold’s relationship with Maude, confusing propriety with morality. Uncle Victor, who lost an arm in military service, tries to recruit Harold into the army with patriotic enthusiasm that the film frames as another form of death worship. None of these figures can help Harold because none of them are actually listening. They are performing their roles, just as Harold performs his.
Death as teacher:
Harold is obsessed with death but has never experienced it. Maude has experienced death—both the mass death of the Holocaust and the approaching reality of her own—and has chosen life. The film argues that a genuine encounter with mortality is the prerequisite for genuine living.
Discussion questions:
The tattoo:
The concentration camp number on Maude’s forearm appears in a single, unnarrated moment. It is the most important image in the film.
Discussion questions:
Institutions that fail:
Every institution in Harold’s life—family, psychiatry, religion, military—fails to help him. Only an anarchic, law-breaking seventy-nine-year-old woman reaches him.
Discussion questions:
Chosen death:
Maude chooses to die on her eightieth birthday. She is not ill. She is not suffering. She has simply decided it’s time. The film presents this without judgment.
Discussion questions:
Understanding the director’s choices deepens appreciation:
The hearse: Harold drives a Jaguar that he has converted into a hearse—a luxury vehicle transformed into a death machine. This is the film’s central visual metaphor: Harold has taken everything life has given him (wealth, youth, privilege) and dedicated it to death. The car is beautiful and morbid, just like Harold. When he drives it over the cliff at the end and doesn’t go with it, the symbolism is explicit: he has separated himself from his vehicle of death. He walks away carrying a banjo instead.
The railroad car: Maude lives in a decommissioned railroad car—a vehicle that once moved but no longer does. Yet inside, it is vibrant, chaotic, beautiful, full of art and music and life. Ashby added this detail; it wasn’t in Higgins’ original script. The railroad car says: you don’t have to be going anywhere to be alive. Maude has stopped moving geographically but hasn’t stopped moving spiritually. Her home is a metaphor for her philosophy: take the container the world gives you and fill it with everything that matters.
The daisies: The field of daisies where Maude delivers her famous reflection is the film’s visual thesis. Thousands of flowers, each individual, each beautiful, each temporary. Maude and Harold sit among them—two more temporary, individual, beautiful things. The camera pulls back to reveal the cemetery behind them. Life and death, sharing the same frame. Not in opposition. In conversation.
Cat Stevens’ music: The soundtrack functions as a character in the film. Stevens’ folk songs—warm, searching, gentle—provide the emotional register that the characters can’t always articulate. The music creates an envelope of tenderness around a story that could easily become bitter or grotesque. When Harold walks away playing banjo at the end, the music takes over completely, and we understand that Harold has absorbed not just Maude’s philosophy but her soundtrack—the melody of being alive.
The fake suicides: Ashby shoots Harold’s staged deaths with escalating visual absurdity—each one more elaborate, more theatrical, more obviously performed. This escalation mirrors Harold’s desperation: he keeps raising the stakes because no one is responding. The visual comedy of the suicides creates a tension that the film eventually pays off with devastating force: when a real death occurs—Maude’s—the film presents it with absolute simplicity. No theatrics. No spectacle. Just a woman in a hospital bed, having made her choice. The visual contrast between Harold’s elaborate fake deaths and Maude’s quiet real one is the film’s most powerful directorial choice.
The daisy field: Maude takes Harold to see thousands of identical-looking flowers and shows him they’re all different. Go somewhere with many similar things—a crowd, a forest, a shelf of books—and describe what makes five of them unique. What did you have to do with your attention to see the differences?
Harold’s letter to Maude: Harold never gets to say goodbye. Write the letter he might have written after—the one that says everything he couldn’t say in time. What does he understand now that he didn’t understand at the party?
The tattoo moment: The film reveals Maude’s Holocaust history in a single, silent image. Write about a moment when you learned something about someone—one detail that reframed everything you thought you knew about them. How did a single piece of information change an entire person in your mind?
The institutional failure report: Harold’s mother, psychiatrist, priest, and uncle all try to help him and all fail. Choose one of these authority figures and write a report from their perspective: what did they think was wrong with Harold? What did they prescribe? Why didn’t it work? What couldn’t they see?
Your hearse and your banjo: Harold drives a hearse (what he’s devoted his life to) and ends up carrying a banjo (what Maude gave him). What is your hearse—the thing you’ve invested in that isn’t serving you? What is your banjo—the thing someone showed you that opened a door? Write about both.
Maude’s eighty years: We know almost nothing about Maude’s life between the concentration camps and her arrival in the film. Write a scene from her middle years—a moment that shows how she became the person Harold meets. What happened between surviving the worst and choosing to live fully?
Other films about mentors who transform:
Other films about choosing life:
Other films about unlikely connections:
The music:
Recommendation: Essential viewing for students aged 16+, with an important caveat. This film deals directly with suicide—both as dark comedy and as serious choice—and with the Holocaust as implicit backstory. For students currently struggling with depression, self-harm, or suicidal ideation, parents should preview the film and consider timing carefully. The film’s message is unambiguously life-affirming—it is perhaps the most passionate argument for living fully that cinema has ever produced—but it reaches that argument through territory that requires emotional readiness.
For students who are ready, Harold and Maude is the perfect closing statement for Objective #27. It takes every lesson from the previous eight films—presence, vulnerability, enchantment, honest connection, humor as resistance, the discipline of beauty in dark times—and grounds them in the hardest possible truth: life ends. You will lose the people you love. The world contains Auschwitz. And the proper response to all of this is not Harold’s fake deaths or his mother’s oblivion or the priest’s disgust or the psychiatrist’s jargon. The proper response is Maude’s banjo. The proper response is to steal a car you need, plant a tree that’s dying, fall in love with whoever your heart recognizes, and be fully, recklessly, defiantly alive for as long as you have. Then let go gracefully. And trust that someone will walk away from the cliff carrying the music you gave them.
