A pair of hands enter the frame, placing a record on a turntable and delicately dropping the needle on the lead-in grooves. An elderly woman wearing purple eyeshadow and coral pink lipstick perches behind a spinet piano, seeming to bang at the keys before rising and dancing a little soft shoe. A teenage boy dances with the elderly woman in a field of wildflowers. After a Jaguar modified to look like a hearse drives off a cliff, the boy stands in a mossy field overlooking the ocean; he adjusts a banjo strap around his neck and picks out a few notes, skipping into the distance as he plays a melody over the closing credits.
Imagining the 1971 comedy Harold & Maude without the music of Cat Stevens is almost impossible. At times, the pop-song soundtrack plays like a Greek chorus, and it could sometimes stand in for protagonist Harold Chasen’s internal monologue. After Stevens left the music industry in the early 1980s, the film kept his music alive through midnight screenings and frequent broadcasts on cable. As Harold & Maude turns 50, how has Stevens’ music for the film aged, and how has his religious conversion influenced the way we see and hear Harold & Maude?
Music played a critical role in Harold & Maude throughout its development. In the earliest drafts of the script, writer Colin Higgins had included music cues for Chopin piano concertos and early 20th century folk music. Paramount executive Mildred Lewis bought the screenplay and put it into production with director Hal Ashby at the helm. Ashby was a fan of British rock bands like the Rolling Stones, which meant that Higgins’ more genteel musical choices would be replaced with something that better reflected the rebellious tone of the film.
The success of The Graduate had led to the release of several small-scale, character-driven films that pointedly used music by distinctive singer/songwriters to comment on the story without directly engaging with the characters. In keeping with this trend, Ashby and producer Charles Mulvehill reached out to Elton John about writing some original songs and appearing in the film as Harold. When Ashby decided John was “too English” to play Harold, he cast up-and-coming actor Bud Cort in the role and gave the song-score duties to one of Elton John’s peers.
“I was turned on to Cat Stevens before I ever started shooting, and I started to listen to a lot of his music,” Ashby is quoted as saying in the liner notes to the 2006 Harold & Maude soundtrack. “What I always used to tell the guys… anything that was sent down that was silent, just grab a track—any track of Cat’s—get all of his albums transferred and grab anything and put with it. So if I’m watching dailies and it’s three or four minutes silent, at least it will be with music, it’ll bring it to life and it’ll be a turn on, I’ll just get ideas from it.”
At his best, Stevens put aching, vulnerable lyrics to jaunty melodies, and the surprising, detailed arrangements and straightforward production of his early 1970s albums had a disarmingly poignant effect on listeners. Stevens’ music gives the episodic structure of the opening scenes a sense of consistency, and his open-hearted lyrical perspective contrasts compellingly with the broad satire and unnerving visuals in those scenes. Harold doesn’t have a lot of substantial dialogue; the use of “On the Road to Find Out”under a scene where Harold buys his first hearse and drives it home mirrors what we know of his mindset and where he is in his life. (Ashby and editors William A. Sawyer and Edward Warschilka wisely faded the song before the fire and brimstone imagery of the last verse.)
For Stevens’ part, Harold & Maude gave him the opportunity to complete some of his unfinished songs and give them a home. “(‘If You Want to Sing Out’) wasn’t quite good enough, I thought, to go on one of the albums,” Stevens said in the liner notes to the 2006 soundtrack release. “When Hal needed something, I said I can do this.” While he characterized the lyrics as “flippant”, the song worked well in the context of the film. We first hear Maude (Ruth Gordon) play the song after telling Harold about her youthful experiences at “picket lines and rallies,” and the studio version of the song is reprised over a scene where Harold gets a glimpse of a concentration camp tattoo on her forearm. Knowing that Maude has been arrested—and worse—for her protests makes the simple lyrics seem unbearably poignant.
In the winter of 1971, Paramount launched a no-frills marketing plan for Harold & Maude. The studio didn’t know how to sell a macabre, anti-establishment romantic comedy to a mass audience, and after the film received a scathing review in Variety, the studio more or less abandoned the film. Thanks to enthusiastic theater owners in college towns, Harold & Maude became a cult hit with college students and other young people, and it had a long second life as a midnight movie.
Harold & Maude was still screening at revival houses when Cat Stevens changed his name to Yusuf Islam and converted to Islam. He retired from the music business in 1980 and mostly stayed out of the public eye in the following years. The film he scored in the previous decade frequently appeared on pay cable schedules, keeping his legend alive when he wasn’t recording music for secular audiences.
Islam became a lightning rod for controversy at the tail end of the 1980s by publicly supporting the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for Rushdie’s depiction of Muhammad in his book The Satanic Verses. While the singer would later claim he was “innocently drawn into the whole controversy”, his words played a role in Rushdie’s decision to go into hiding.
Though radio stations pulled Islam’s music from their playlist and destroyed his albums, Harold & Maude remained a staple on TV schedules and midnight screenings. The film has remained popular with filmmakers and general audiences alike because it speaks to a need to be understood and accepted. Islam’s later statements contradicted his work on Harold & Maude, but the film’s message was powerful enough to reach later generations and inspire them to “sing out”. 
“Harold and Maude” was just re-issued on Blu-ray from the “Paramount Plus” line. It is also streaming on Kanopy and available for digital rental or purchase.
