While a film student at UCLA, writer/director Colin Higgins made a short subject for his master's thesis. That short was later expanded into the 1970 feature film Harold and Maude, which also represented Higgins' debut as a producer. Combining Higgins' two favorite movie elements, slapstick comedy and sudden death, Harold and Maude was a box-office failure but an almost instantaneous cult success. Five years later, Higgins scored his first tangible movie hit, Silver Streak (1975), which characteristically used a suspense-film plotline upon which to mount several first-rate comic sequences. The same formula was applied to Higgins' next moneymaker, Foul Play (1978). Shortly after serving as producer and screenwriter for Out on a Limb, Colin Higgins died of AIDS at the age of 47.
Harold and Maude
While Harold is part of a society where he can have no importance and no meaning, Maude has survived against totalitarianism. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, Harold can only feel significant by dying. Maude, on the other hand, is a fictionalizer and a dreamer. She imagines beauty where there is none, believes in the innate goodness of people (but not the State), and practices what she calls her own individual revolution. Her backstory is only hinted in the film. She tells Harold at one point about Alfred Dreyfus seeing fantastic birds on Devil's Island and finding out later that they were only seagulls. She says that to her they would always be fantastic birds.
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