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Appropriate for a film that takes on loss as one of its main themes, death shapes the Criterion Collection edition of Harold and Maude (1971). Several of the film’s contributors—director Hal Ashby, screenwriter Collin Higgins, and lead actress Ruth Gordon—died before this edition went into production. Thus there are few amenities Criterion can offer for this edition. Ashby biographer Nick Dawson and producer Charles B. Mullvehill attempt to account for this lack in their composite commentary. Ashby’s and Higgins’s absences are also supplemented by seminar discussions from the mid-1970s that were compiled from heavily edited audio recordings and are accompanied by a photo montage of the director and screenwriter from the period. There are reprinted interviews with Gordon, costar Bud Cort, cinematographer John Alonzo, and executive producer Mildred Lewis. Collaborative creative labor’s institutional and …