The archetypal cusp-of-the-'60s/'70s movie

HAROLD & MAUDE is the archetypical 1970/71 movie.

People who claim that this film is "outdated" or "simplistic" always confound me ---- how old are you anyway, and do you think every movie should look and sound like it was made last Thursday?

If so, you miss the very thing which films, at their best, can offer: a portal into another bygone era.

The cultural changes of the mid-to-late-'60s were so profound, so resonant, that the 1960s felt like two decades in one. And by, say, 1970, people felt as if we were indeed at the end of a long and winding road (in keeping with the Beatles' last #1 hit released that year).

1970/71, when HAROLD & MAUDE was filmed/released, was the melancholy cap of the '60s.

Almost no film gets it any better: the funereal (literally) mood, the bittersweet montages, the forlorn disillusionment.

So wonderful.

Although much of what Hollywood does is too self-conscious or too over-produced to really evoke a period accurately (other than perhaps the hairstyles), on the cusp of the '60s/'70s, several TV and movie projects somehow managed to really capture the heartbroken zeitgeist of the period: the street montages in MIDNIGHT COWBOY, the snow angel/ice skating montage in LOVE STORY, the first season opening theme design and orchestration to THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW.

And, of course, HAROLD & MAUDE.

The world felt exactly like this at the dividing line between the two decades of the '60s & '70s, no matter what you were actually doing at the time.

It just did.


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The most profound of sin is tragedy unremembered.