MovieChat Forums > Harold and Maude (1971) Discussion > A crucial film if you want to understand...

A crucial film if you want to understand the 60s

posted 11 years ago by nedhorn
7 replies | jump to latest

Ok, it was made in 71. But it caught the whole 60s Zeitgeist better than any other movie. Harold is what every young man growing up during vietnam felt like

[–] PrometheusTree64 11 years ago

Funny, I was about to post that it's the archetypical 1970/71 movie.

We're essentially saying exactly the same thing, however. As 1970/71 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.

The world felt exactly like this movie on the cusp of the '60s & '70s, no matter what you were actually doing at the time.

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[–] sockscats 11 years ago

Cultural movements don't stop at the end of a decade and have little regard for who is in the white house. The decade of that movement was really more like 1964-1973.

I agree this is a very 60s film.

[–] sdckapr 11 years ago

I agree this is a very 60s film

I think the film context is about the 60's (probably mid to late 1960's) and as you indicate the "movement was really more like 1964-1973", this would be about 1964 - 1970 (the film was released in 1971).

I do think it is very much a film of the 1970s though, reflected in the style, the ant-establishment nature, etc. The movement in the 1960s created some of the films of the 1970s (MASH, Easy Rider, Harold and Maude, etc)

[–] PrometheusTree64 11 years ago

Yes, in may ways I always think of the '60s really ending, symbolically and ambivalently, when Nixon's helicopter lifted off of the White House lawn and disappeared over the trees after resigning under the Watergate scandal.

And that was August of '74.

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[–] 11 years ago

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[–] PrometheusTree64 11 years ago

Agreed.

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Non-sequiturs are delicious.

[–] 11 years ago

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