Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

A cure for the box office blues

By ROBYN E. BLUMNER
Published September 18, 2005

The movie industry is in a slump. The summer box office take was abysmal, down 9 percent from last year and the worst performance since 2001. The news has movie executives shaking in their Gommini soles.

Many explanations have been floated for this malaise, including the contraction between the time a movie hits the big screen and when it becomes available on DVD. But lack of quality has to top the list. Thanks to the warnings of movie critics and trusted friends, I steered clear of a couple of the summer biggies: War of the Worlds and Bewitched - life is too short.

I have to admit I did pull myself off the couch to see March of the Penguins and Mad Hot Ballroom - two utterly charming documentaries that deserved to be the summer's sleepers. But the only other widely released movie I caught was Mr. & Mrs. Smith. I saw it because it was the only movie starting at the local multiplex just as a friend and I finished dinner. Really. (It made for a rather noisy dessert.)

Reflexively, I compare every movie I see to my all-time, hands-down, no-contest favorite, just to see how it stacks up. Most don't come close.

No, my favorite isn't Casablanca or Dr. Strangelove.

To be honest, I pass over those movies when they pop up as cable options. After multiple viewings, they don't hold my interest anymore. (Sacrilege, I know.)

If I've got you curious, my favorite movie is Harold and Maude.

There hasn't been a movie made before or since that has so successfully combined comedy, tragedy, romance, political and cultural satire, a great soundtrack and an 80-year-old sex symbol (and as I age, that aspect of the film becomes more and more endearing).

I never got to see Harold and Maude in the theaters. It was released in 1971, and I was a bit too young. So, it wasn't until the advent of the VCR that I was exposed to director Hal Ashby's masterpiece. Since then, I have watched it dozens of times and have introduced it to many, many friends. If you cross my threshold and I find out you're a "virgin," expect to be buttonholed for the entire 91-minute running time. For years, Harold and Maude and A Thousand Clowns were the only movies I owned.

For those who don't know the plot, it is a romantic, black comedy about a very rich but disaffected young man, Harold, who meets a wonderfully eccentric elderly woman, Maude (played by the incomparable Ruth Gordon). They bump into each other at a series of funerals - both go to funerals as a kind of hobby. Harold (embodied by the bug-eyed Bud Cort) is obsessed with faking his own death as a way to provoke his controlling, society-maven mother. When she buys Harold an E-Type Jaguar, he converts it into a hearse.

Maude breathes life into Harold, showing him how to be engaged with the world. We watch as Maude's weird, quirky behavior goes from offputting to lovable. She fights to change society, but in her small way, such as taking a dying tree from a large curbside municipal container and replanting it back in the forest.

The film evokes the counterculture of the late 1960s, with send-ups of political, religious and military authority. Nixon and Freud appear as repeated foils. And while certain aspects of the film are quite dated, the messages are timeless. Cat Stevens is at his full-throated best on the soundtrack.

When you're this smitten with a movie or any cultural experience for that matter (Trekkies come to mind), you tend to look around for people with a similar devotion. In touring a few fan-oriented Web sites, I learned that this movie was not universally well received by critics when it was released.

""Harold and Maude has all the fun and gaiety of a burning orphanage," one reviewer wrote. It received no Oscar nominations.

The screenplay was written by Colin Higgins as his thesis in the UCLA screenwriting MFA program. Now, I don't expect today's overly vetted, corporately approved, three-script-doctors-later screenplays to be as fresh and innovative as Higgins' schoolwork. But it would be nice to see some spark of smart, topical irreverence in today's so-called comedies.

Sorry, I don't think jokes about bodily fluids or bodily organs are funny. I'm not a 14-year-old boy. But fake suicide, now that's funny.

[Last modified September 16, 2005, 18:49:02]