It was the original cult film. A movie you had to show your girlfriend or boyfriend so they understood you. And it was the comedy Variety called “as much fun as a burning orphanage.” ... 50 years on, the touching, droll and subversive story of a troubled teenager, played by Bud Cort, who falls in love with a nearly 80-year old free spirit, played by Ruth Gordon, still feels fresh and funny. ... Released with almost no marketing on the same date “The Godfather” was supposed to premiere, “Harold and Maude” flopped spectacularly in its initial release. Yet over time, it slowly caught on as a repertory theater staple, becoming a ‘70s touchstone and finally recouping its budget several years later.

The anti-authoritarian, flower-power spirit that Harold and Maude espoused had generally fallen out of favour by the time of its release. The deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin the year before had signalled the end of an era. The Summer of Love slumped into dusk, and the hippie energy it carried curdled into cynicism. Audiences and critics mostly reacted to the film with revulsion. In one of the most famously scathing reviews Harold and Maude received, Variety wrote that the film was about "as funny as a burning orphanage". It wasn't long before Harold and Maude would enjoy its cult revival, however, thanks to college campuses across the US, which screened late-night viewings of the film. Perhaps it was the film's Nietzschean spirit and its call to live deliberately, thoroughly, exuberantly that appealed to the stoned and listless liberal arts students of the '70s, or perhaps it was its satire of the American bourgeoisie and all its institutions – religion, psychology, the family, the military.

...what we get, finally, is a movie of attitudes. Harold is death, Maude life, and they manage to make the two seem so similar that life's hardly worth the extra bother. The visual style makes everyone look fresh from the Wax Museum, and all the movie lacks is a lot of day-old gardenias and lilies and roses in the lobby, filling the place with a cloying sweet smell. Nothing more to report today. Harold doesn't even make pallbearer.

There are, indeed, some other funny things in "Harold and Maude" (an airy confrontation between Maude and the cop who stops her for speeding in a stolen truck), but they are all terribly incidental to the movie's main concern, which is apparently that there is a time to live and a time to die (when you reach 80.)As Harold and Maude, Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon are supposed to appear magnificently mismatched for the purposes of the comedy. They are mismatched, at least visually. Mr. Cort's baby face and teen-age build look grotesque alongside Miss Gordon's tiny, weazened frame.Yet, as performers, they both are so aggressive, so creepy and off-putting, that Harold and Maude are obviously made for each other, a point the movie itself refuses to recognize with a twist ending that betrays, I think, its life-affirming pretensions.