The Graduate (1967)
SYNOPSIS
Benjamin Braddock returns home to his wealthy parents in California
after finishing college back East, uncertain of his future and unable to
make any kind of decisive move in his life. He falls into an affair with
an older woman, Mrs. Robinson, the wife of his father's business
partner, but the relationship only depresses and confuses him more.
Then he reconnects with the Robinsons' daughter, Elaine, and over her
mother's violent objections begins to pursue her, discovering for the
first time a sense of meaning and purpose in his life.
Director: Mike Nichols
Producer: Lawrence Turman
Screenplay: Calder Willingham, Buck Henry, based on the novel by
Charles Webb
Cinematography: Robert Surtees
Editing: Sam O'Steen
Production Design: Richard Sylbert
Cast: Anne Bancroft (Mrs. Robinson), Dustin Hoffman (Ben Braddock),
Katharine Ross (Elaine Robinson), William Daniels (Mr. Braddock),
Murray Hamilton (Mr. Robinson),
Why THE GRADUATE is Essential
After more than 40 years The Graduate remains so iconic that
images, lines, and references, both direct and oblique, keep turning up
throughout popular culture. It's a measure of the film's lasting impact
and appeal that it's still discussed, debated, and dissected among
scholars, critics, and fans; some see it as a groundbreaking, sharp
satire of the younger generation seeking to break free of the
stultifying hypocrisy of their parents while others view it as a
superficially clever and essentially conservative take on the youth
culture in bloom at the time. The truth probably lies in the middle...or
somewhere else altogether.
Witness the various reactions to the final scene alone: Is it an
expression of love winning the day even as it faces an uncertain
future? Or a cop-out that virtually advertises the most sacred notions
of chaste courtship blooming into "the lasting and conventionally
monogamous relationship," as one critic put it. Director Mike Nichols
has said that scene is the one thing he most likes about the film, the
fact that Ben and Elaine don't know what to say to each other, the
sense that they're ill-prepared for whatever lies ahead. To him, this
last moment shows that Ben and Elaine will end up like their
parentsnothing changed, little gained from a moment of sheer
impulse.
In fact, Nichols has said The Graduate is not at all about the
"generation gap," as it is so often perceived, but about the idea
of objectsthe material things people strive to acquire and cling to in
their lives, the objects through which people become objects
themselves. For him, Benjamin's story is not one of youth in rebellion
but of someone trying to become "active instead of passive" and
struggling "not to be used as an object" like everything surrounding
him.
Despite critical analysis and revision, and Nichols' statements
notwithstanding, The Graduate remains in our cultural memory as
the quintessential youth picture of its time; it is a portrait of New
America (the 60s) versus Old (the 50s), with themes, narrative
devices, and cinematic techniques influenced by European and avantgarde movies and popularized in television commercials. Its
soundtrack alone became a huge bestselling album, featuring pop
songs that, even when not obviously connected to the actions or the
characters on screen, added a certain tone. This is a method used
(some say overused) to this day, particularly in movies about love and
angst among younger generations. Regardless of what one reads into
the movie's ideas, intentions, and effects, it certainly signaled a fresh,
freer, and more daring Hollywood, paving the way for the new
directors and bold films that emerged in the following decade.
In his insightful look at the cinema era that came to be known as
"New Hollywood," Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs and
Rock-'n'-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, Peter Biskind noted that,
along with Bonnie and Clyde(1967), The Graduate "sent tremors
through the industry," kicking off a decade when film directors
enjoyed more power and prestige than they ever had before. Fueled by
the auteur theory that had emerged from France in the 1950s and was
first popularized in this country in the 1960s by Andrew Sarris of
the Village Voice, these young filmmakers were unembarrassed, as
Biskind said, "to assume the mantle of artists." They also developed
their own personal style that would be as much of the film's attraction
as the story and characters. Already established as a promising young
director with his debut film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966),
Nichols became one of the most powerful and influentialand the most
highly paidof this new breed, thanks to the huge commercial success
of The Graduate, his sophomore effort.
With these new directors came a new generation of actors, Dustin
Hoffman one of the foremost among them, who broke the mold of the
traditional movie star and brought to their roles a new candor,
ethnicity, and eagerness to dive deep into complex, even unlikable
characters. While Hoffman would go much farther on this track in
films to come, in The Graduate he created a lasting resonance as Ben
Braddock that made him an overnight sensation and set him on the
road to becoming one of our biggest stars and most respected actors.
Whether the film reflected the social-protest movement of the decade
or romanticized youth for an older mass audience, it was undeniably a
phenomenon of the era.
by Rob Nixon
The Graduate (1967)
Pop Culture 101: THE GRADUATE
Charles Webb wrote a sequel to his
famous book but did not publish it for
several years because he had sold all
the film rights to his novel and any sequels or other writings about
the characters; the rights are now owned by France's Canal+. That
meant the studio could film the sequel without his permission and
with no compensation to Webb. The book, Home School was finally
published by Thomas Dunne Books in 2008 and drew good reviews for
its satire of the counter-culture in the years immediately following
Vietnam. The story is set eleven years after the original. Ben and
Elaine are now married suburbanites living in Westchester County,
New York, and home schooling their sons, their single concession to
an alternative life. (Webb and his wife also home-schooled their
children at a time when it was still not legal, and had to move
frequently to escape the consequences.) The situation gets out of hand
when Mrs. Robinson shows up at their door and Ben and Elaine, in an
effort to get rid of her, invite into their home an obnoxious hippie
family. The book slyly skewers the notion that The Graduate was
about youthful rebellion by portraying Ben and Elaine as a typically
square suburban couple.
The Graduate was adapted into a play by Terry Johnson that began its
run in London, then ran on Broadway in 2002-03, starring Kathleen
Turner as Mrs. Robinson, Jason Biggs as Ben, and Alicia Silverstone as
Elaine.
The lines "Plastics." and "Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me."
are #42 and #63 on the American Film Institute's list of the Greatest
Movie Quotes.
In the movie Rumor Has It... (2005), Jennifer Aniston plays a woman
who learns that her family was the inspiration for the book and film
of The Graduate. Shirley MacLaine plays her grandmother, who may
be the basis for Mrs. Robinson, and Kevin Costner plays a man who
could be the inspiration for Ben Braddock.
In (500) Days of Summer (2009), the narrator says that Tom, the male
lead, has a notion of love and romance based on a complete
misreading of the ending of The Graduate, his favorite film. Later in
the movie, Tom and Summer, the woman he's in love with, go to see
the movie. She breaks down crying at the end and, probably reading
the film correctly, ends her relationship with him.
In one episode of the offbeat TV comedy series Northern Exposure, a
character is told to pursue his love the way Ben does Elaine, and we
see him do it in a dream sequence.
In The Player (1992), Buck Henry, who co-wrote the screenplay,
pitches a sequel to a studio executive in which Ben and Elaine are
married and Mrs. Robinson lives with them after suffering a stroke.
The ending of The Graduate was parodied in an episode of The
Simpsons animated TV series, and the whole third act of the movie
was spoofed in Wayne's World 2 (1993).
The TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000, in which off-screen
characters make fun of the movies being screened, featured famous
dialogue from The Graduate, either directly or slightly altered to suit
the movie being shown.
The list of other direct or oblique references to The Graduate, and
allusions to it that fans swear they've spotted in film and on
television, is too long to detail every incident. There have been
multiple instances of characters discussing the movie (e.g., A Small
Circle of Friends, 1980; Slaves to the Underground, 1997); shots that
mimic the famous poster with Ben framed inside Mrs. Robinson's
naked leg; spoofs of the final wedding scene; and uses of the line "Are
you trying to seduce me?" In the various Shrek movies alone, there
have been several references.
It's a sign of the impact of The Graduate that on the film's "Movie
Connections" page of the Internet Movie Database users have listed
dozens of stories in which an older person seduces a younger one as
references to this movie, when in fact such seductions have taken
place throughout film history.
Although used repeatedly throughout The Graduate, only a small
portion of the Paul Simon song "Mrs. Robinson" is heard on the
soundtrack. Simon wrote additional verses and altered the lyrics; the
new version was included in the 1968 Simon and Garfunkel
album Bookends. The single, released the same year, hit #1 on the
Billboard charts and won the duo a Grammy Award for Record of the
Year in 1969.
The scenes in the Taft Hotel were actually filmed in Los Angeles'
Ambassador Hotel, where Robert Kennedy was assassinated less than
six months after the film's release.
The son of Charles Webb, the author of the book on which the film
was based, is a performance artist who once cooked a copy of his
father's novel and ate it with cranberry sauce.
When The Graduate was first released in Portugal, it was cut to end
with Ben behind the glass at the church, watching Elaine get married.
The ruling military regime at the time did this to preserve Catholic
doctrine and to let no suggestion pass that church, state, and parents
could be opposed.
Webb was named in a British publication in 2006 in its list of
"World's Biggest Mugs And the Blunders That Cost Them a Fortune"
for signing away all film rights to his book and its characters for
$20,000. Also named in the article were Dick Rowe, the Decca Records
executive who passed on signing the Beatles, and Kane Kramer, who
invented the precursor to the iPod in 1979 then let the patent lapse.
In the 1970s, a bus on the campus of Kent State University bore a
plaque that said "Movie Star," claiming it was the bus used in the final
scene when Ben escapes with Elaine.
by Rob Nixon