Hal Ashby's 1971 black comedy certainly has one of the most unusual romantic pairings in movie history, the titular characters being a death-obsessed teenage boy and a 79-year-old woman with a passionate zeal for living life to the fullest. Harold is a nihilistic young man who gets a kick out of staging fake suicides in front of his overbearing mother, who encounters Maude while attending the funeral of a complete stranger and strikes up an odd couple friendship. Maude enjoys stealing cars (for which she has a set of skeleton keys) and decorating her home - an abandoned train carriage - with an endless array of bric-a-brac. Their mutual eccentricities are more than enough for their friendship to blossom, eventually becoming something much closer and intimate. A cult classic, Harold and Maude is a brilliantly off-beat comedy with a twisted sense of humour and foot-tapping Cat Stevens soundtrack, which can't help but remind you of a Wes Anderson film - indeed, Anderson cites it as a cinematic influence on his second feature, Rushmore - it's easy to see why.
