Harold and Maude was directed by an American, Hal Ashby, and stars two Americans, Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon. Yet the whole movie feels extremely British, to the point where I actually assumed it was a British movie when I first watched it (at least for the first 15 minutes or so.)
The movie was filmed in California. Yet at no point does it feel like a “California movie.” The sky is perpetually overcast; all the outdoor scenes look like coastal England or Scotland. Harold’s house is an ancient-looking mansion with old fashioned dark wood paneling and a courtyard. He drives a Jaguar, one of the quintessentially British cars.
Harold’s mother has a put-on British accent. Harold’s psychiatrist has an extremely pronounced upper-class British accent. The priest at the funeral where Harold first meets Maude has a British accent. Even Ruth Gordon herself has a quasi-British accent.
And the soundtrack, which is so distinctive as to practically be its own character, is all sung by Cat Stevens, who is, of course, British.
To anyone who has not seen this movie in a long while and thinks I may be out to lunch with this post - I challenge you to watch it, with what I have said in mind, and tell me I’m wrong. The movie seems incredibly British.
Have you been to Northern California? You don’t want to go California Dreamin’; go surfing with a bunch of blond(e) people and you’re liable to freeze to death.
I do know what you mean otherwise though. For some reason I associate this movie with Withnail and I but I don’t know why. Maybe the “and” in the title or the genre, maybe the 1970’s feel, even though Withnail is 1986 (but British films/TV sometimes lagged in quality).
Harold and Maude was written by Collin Higgins, who grew up in Australia. It had British and Irish actors in some of the main roles. What it seems like to me is a typical example of the early 1970’s lower-budget films that occasionally came out of Hollywood. They often flagrantly ignored the typical restrictions of Hollywood films. They had offbeat themes and were sometimes rather depressing. I can imagine how someone who’s only familiar with recent Hollywood films might see it as being not very American.
Harold and Maude was/is a cult hit in Berlin. The entire time I lived there, it played to packed houses in a movie theater on Bleibtreustrasse every weekend. It was the English version and, when they finally decided to dub it into German years later, there was such an uproar that they pulled the dubbed version and put the English version back in the movie theater.
It was such a hit that Collin Higgins came to Berlin and created a stage version of his movie. The stage version bombed, but the fact that producers paid to fly Colin to Berlin to create this play lets you know this was a bona fide cult-classic hit.
I mention all this as the original film did most certainly have a “European” feel to it, if not necessarily British. It was a small, low budget, story-driven film that seemed to touch a nerve and got Berliners to see it over and over again.