This song is one of two Cat Stevens wrote for “Harold and Maude.” I was late getting to that movie, I didn’t see it until 1978 and it had come out in 1971. I guess it was the description, “death-obsessed 20 year old falls for 80 year old woman” that kept me away for so long.
It’s played twice during the film, once, sung by Ruth Gordon’s Maude, and again….SPOILER ALERT…. after Harold has run his Jaguar hearse off a cliff following Maude’s suicide. The camera pulls back and pans up from the crumpled wreckage to the top of the cliff where a lone figure, Harold, is plucking the song on a banjo given to him by Maude, then Cat’s voice comes in and the song ends the movie on a glorious, life-affirming note.
If you’ve never seen it, go out and buy it or get it from Netflix (I just got my Blu-Ray, Criterion Collection edition, that came out on the 12th). Don’t let the thumbnail description put you off. It’s full of funny stuff and it has a great selection of Cat Stevens’ songs. There’s seven songs from “Mona Bone Jakon” and “Tea for the Tillerman”, plus two written specifically for the film.
I saw it on HBO in 1978 (more on that coming up on “Kaffred’s Zune”), but did not get the full impact until I saw it at the Parkway theater in Chicago several years later in a double feature with “Where’s Poppa”, another black comedy starring Ruth Gordon, that, though very funny, pales in comparison with “Harold and Maude.”
When I saw it on a full sized screen, for the first time I saw what Harold saw on Maude’s arm as they sat overlooking a harbor. It’s a number tattooed on her forearm from a concentration camp. Nowhere else in the film is it mentioned she is a Holocaust survivor. Up to that point, you see Maude as a sprite (AKA “Manic Pixie Dream girl” in a Wikipedia entry, "that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures."), teaching Harold the ways of the world with humor and insight, but that shot brought a gasp from me. On TV, you can’t see the tattoo (on my 19” anyway).
Harold, being death obsessed, goes to funerals (it's where he meets Maude, she does the same for other reasons). At the first funeral in the film there is a close-up of the casket as it is going into the hearse and until I saw it on a big screen, I didn't see the brand of casket, an Elgin! At one time Elgin was a hub of manufacturing: watches, bikes, street sweepers and caskets. Now we make burritos and lattes.
Harold, being death obsessed, goes to funerals (it's where he meets Maude, she does the same for other reasons). At the first funeral in the film there is a close-up of the casket as it is going into the hearse and until I saw it on a big screen, I didn't see the brand of casket, an Elgin! At one time Elgin was a hub of manufacturing: watches, bikes, street sweepers and caskets. Now we make burritos and lattes.
In the late 70s and early 80s there were two theaters in the area that ran older films. The Parkway in Chicago changed its double feature daily, while the Varsity, in Evanston, changed their double feature every 2-4 days.
I would get the flyer for each and make my plans to see the films each had. I enjoyed Francois Truffaut films and Werner Herzog films (that final shot in “Aguirre, Wrath of God” with the monkeys chittering around Klaus Kinski on a raft in the middle of a South American river still haunts me). The Parkway would have a Worst Film Festival every year and it was great to see the horrible movies with a full house.
There’s nothing like an audience to make the experience, I almost wet myself laughing at the trilogy of “Plan 9 from Outer Space” (lovingly re-created by Tim Burton and Johnny Depp in “Ed Wood”), “Robot Monster” (the director couldn’t afford a real costume so his “robot” was a guy in a gorilla suit with a space helmet on his head), and “Reefer Madness” (just plain funny, unintentionally).
I went through a phase in the early 1980s where I wanted to purchase or run a movie theater like these two, even going so far as driving down to Auburn, Illinois (about 4.5 hours south of Chicago) to look at a theater/coffee shop building. I did some research and found there were 4-5 small colleges within a 50-mile radius or so form Auburn that I could draw from, I thought.
However, the owner wanted $80,000 dollars for the building (I was working at Accutronics at the time after getting my MA from Western Illinois, making about $22,000/year) and I knew nothing about how to go about procuring older films or running a projector and I also knew that VCRs were becoming more popular and more and more obscure movies were becoming available. In fact, I think that building became a video store; it never reopened as a theater.
I think it was one of my better decisions to not purchase that albatross, though if I won the lottery tomorrow, and didn’t have to worry about running out of money, I’d seriously consider buying an old movie palace and fixing it up and running the movies I’d like to see on the big screen again. Movies like “Days of Heaven”, “Close Encounters”, “Day for Night”, my favorite Truffaut film, “Apocalypse Now”, “Heaven’s Gate” (I know, but I liked it), Abel Gance’s “Napoleon” (I was lucky enough to see it at the Chicago Theater with a full orchestra in 1980(?)), ”Blade Runner”, “The Music Man” (guilty pleasure!), “Help!” (first saw it at the StarView Drive-in, in Elgin, long gone), and, of course, the Star Wars and “Lord of the Rings” films.
So, until that day arrives, if anyone out there would like to sponsor me….
