The Graduate (1967 film)
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"A true classic that still feels as fresh as ever, Mike Nichols’s prototypical coming-of-age drama pinpoints the desires and angst of a new generation about to enter adulthood. Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft bring it to life, merging with their indelible characters to create new cinematic icons."
— MUBI's take
The Graduate (1967 film)
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1996.
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The Graduate is a 1967 American independent romantic comedy-drama film directed by Mike Nichols and written by Buck Henry and Calder Willingham, based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Charles Webb, who wrote it shortly after graduating from Williams College. The film tells the story of 21-year-old Benjamin Braddock, a recent college graduate with no well-defined aim in life who is seduced by an older married woman, Mrs. Robinson, but then falls for her daughter, Elaine.
Why It Rocks
- While the film mostly stays true to the spirit of the novel it's based on, most of the changes done for the film surprisingly work very well and don't detract from the film's quality. At lot of the novel's more controversial elements -- a long hitchhiking sequence, a firefighting adventure, instances of homophobia, and Braddock’s encounters with prostitutes -- had been removed for the film, leaving a black comedy about a confused, alienated college graduate who starts an affair with a married woman and then falls in love with her daughter.
- Henry and Nichols understood that Braddock’s indecision and guilt over Mrs. Robinson mirrored the younger generation's love-hate relationship both with their parents and with what they saw as an outdated, unworkable culture. For most viewers, the film distilled the argument down to a single word: “plastics,” given as business advice to Braddock at a party of his parents friends. (The scene was one of Henry’s most significant contributions to the story; another was his deadpan performance as a hotel clerk.)
- “Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me,” is spoken by Benjamin twelve minutes into the film, after Mrs. Robinson has lured him to her house, plied him with alcohol, turned on some relaxing music, and asked him suggestive questions. We’ve known for several minutes that she was trying to seduce him, and the fact that he is only now realizing it (and, in fact, still isn’t quite sure) is hilarious. So is the fact that as he says the line, Nichols frames him between Mrs. Robinson’s opened legs—one of the most iconic images in Hollywood history.
- Talented acting from the majority of the cast:
- Anne Bancroft provides an incredible portrayal of Mrs. Robinson giving the role considerably more nuance and emotional depth than the script suggested. She made what could have been a frat boy's dirty joke the only character in the film who had an understanding of her world.
- The role of Benjamin catapulted twenty-nine-year-old Dustin Hoffman to instant stardom, with some claiming he epitomized "a new breed of actors"
- In the novel, Braddock is described as blond and handsome, but the director took a radical approach to casting him and ultimately settled on Dustin Hoffman wanting to reverse expectations about Braddock. "He couldn't be a blond, blue-eyed person, because then why is he having trouble in the country of the blond, blue-eyed people"?
- Nichols made sure the film would be accepted by a mainstream audience by treating the plot’s potentially sordid elements discreetly. The Graduate remains middlebrow in message, style, and technique. While Nichols calls for some elaborate camera trickery, skirts tastefully around some sexual encounters, gently ribs middle-class suburbia, and lards the soundtrack with folk-rock tunes, his film never challenges the status quo—it ultimately accepts it.
- The camera describes and comically exaggerates Ben’s alienation. He is almost always alone onscreen, to the right of the composition, with a great expanse of emptiness to his left. Only later when he finally has a goal he can believe in, claiming Elaine even though she is about to be married, is Ben finally on the left side of the screen, no longer drifting, now filled with purpose, rushing toward the destiny he has chosen. At the end of the film, he shares the frame equally with Elaine on the back of the bus as they move ahead into an uncertain future. He has found a kindred spirit with whom to share his isolation. But the ending is unsettling, if not downright pessimistic. What, exactly, are they running to? Probably plastics and a bad marriage. They’ve been together all of a few minutes, and already there are the sounds of silence between them.
- While writer Buck Henry and director Mike Nichols said they never meant the film as a social statement, its 1967 release date wound up too perfectly timed to prevent it from becoming anything less than a cultural phenomenon, intended or not. Its nudity and sex quotient also represented a new era of society, not to mention a major loosening of Hollywood censorship restrictions. In American culture, The Graduate will forever stand as one of the key symbols of the 1960s.
- The thematic content of The Graduate—not to mention its stellar Simon and Garfunkel music—may be attuned to the 1960s, but its embrace of screwball comedy has kept it fresh ever since. At a certain point the film shifts modes, from a classic screwball comedy into practically a drama with Mrs. Robinson as the evil femme fatale and her daughter, Elaine, as Benjamin’s romantic interest, but the comedy framework is still there until the ambiguous, bittersweet finale.
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