FILM

Alamo Drafthouse Mason (Katy) presents Big Screen Classics: HAROLD AND MAUDE.

Like a rich Bordeaux from a good vintage, some films age well, delicately maturing and growing more sophisticated with each passing year. There is a wealth of cinematic gems out there, gathering dust in the annals of time. Enter Big Screen Classics - a place where we celebrate all of the accomplishments in movies over the past 100+ years. Here you'll see the crème de la crème of old movie magic.  You'll always be amazed at the riches of cinema history at Big Screen Classics.

This series also encompasses our Digital Classics Series. The newest advancement in digital movie technology involves the painstaking restoration and preservation of classic films using computer technology. The films are then printed onto 4K or 2K digital drives, providing the clearest and brightest image possible using our state-of-the-art digital projectors. Whenever an archive or a studio announces a new digital restoration, we rush to bring it to the Alamo.

Black comedies don't come much blacker than this cult favorite from 1972, and they don't come much funnier, either. It seemed that director Hal Ashby was the perfect choice to mine a mother lode of eccentricity from the original script by Colin Higgins, about the unlikely romance between a death-obsessed 19-year-old named Harold (Bud Cort) and a life-loving 79-year-old widow named Maude (Ruth Gordon). They meet at a funeral, and Maude finds something oddly appealing about Harold, urging him to "reach out" and grab life by the lapels as opposed to dwelling morbidly on mortality. Harold grows fond of the old gal--she's a lot more fun than the girls his mother desperately matches him up with--and together they make HAROLD AND MAUDE, one of the sweetest and most unconventional love stories ever made.

Much of the earlier humor arises from Harold's outrageous suicide fantasies, played out as a kind of twisted parlor game to mortify his mother, who's grown immune to her strange son's antics. Gradually, however, the film's clever humor shifts to a brighter outlook and finally arrives at a point where Harold is truly happy to be alive. Featuring soundtrack songs by Cat Stevens, this comedy certainly won't appeal to all tastes (it was a box-office flop when first released), but if you're on its quirky wavelength, it might just strike you as one of the funniest movies you've ever seen. (Jeff Shannon)