the graduate movie review

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, the graduate.

Now streaming on:

Well, here *is* to you, Mrs. Robinson: You've survived your defeat at the hands of that insufferable creep, Benjamin, and emerged as the most sympathetic and intelligent character in "The Graduate.'' How could I ever have thought otherwise? What murky generational politics were distorting my view the first time I saw this film? Watching the 30th anniversary revival of "The Graduate'' is like looking at photos of yourself at an old fraternity dance. You're gawky and your hair is plastered down with Brylcreem, and your date looks as if you found her behind the counter at the Dairy Queen. But--who's the babe in the corner? The great-looking brunette with the wide-set eyes and the full lips and the knockout figure? Hey, it's the chaperone! Great movies remain themselves over the generations; they retain a serene sense of their own identity. Lesser movies are captives of their time. They get dated and lose their original focus and power. "The Graduate'' (I can see clearly now) is a lesser movie. It comes out of a specific time in the late 1960s when parents stood for stodgy middle-class values, and "the kids'' were joyous rebels at the cutting edge of the sexual and political revolutions. Benjamin Braddock ( Dustin Hoffman ), the clueless hero of "The Graduate,'' was swept in on that wave of feeling, even though it is clear today that he was utterly unaware of his generation and existed outside time and space (he seems most at home at the bottom of a swimming pool).

"The Graduate,'' released in 1967, contains no flower children, no hippies, no dope, no rock music, no political manifestos and no danger. It is a movie about a tiresome bore and his well-meaning parents. The only character in the movie who is alive--who can see through situations, understand motives, and dare to seek her own happiness--is Mrs. Robinson ( Anne Bancroft ). Seen today, "The Graduate'' is a movie about a young man of limited interest, who gets a chance to sleep with the ranking babe in his neighborhood, and throws it away in order to marry her dorky daughter.

Consider, for a moment, the character of Elaine ( Katharine Ross ), Mrs. Robinson's daughter. She has no dialogue of any depth. She has an alarming fetish for false eyelashes. She agrees to marry a tall, blond jock ( Brian Avery ) mostly because her parents will be furious with her if she doesn't. She is so witless that she misunderstands everything Benjamin says to her. When she discovers Benjamin has slept with her mother, she is horrified, but before they have ever had a substantial conversation about the subject, she has forgiven him--apparently because Mrs. Robinson is so hateful that it couldn't have been Benjamin's fault. She then escapes from the altar at her own wedding to flee with Benjamin on a bus, where they look at each other nervously, perhaps because they are still to have a meaningful conversation.

As Benjamin and Elaine escaped in that bus at the end of "The Graduate,'' I cheered, the first time I saw the movie. What was I thinking of? What did the scene celebrate? "Doing your own thing,'' I suppose.

Occasionally I will meet an almost-adult son of friends, and notice that he behaves like a mute savage in company, responding to conversation with grunts and inarticulate syllables. This behavior is usually accompanied by uncoordinated lurches, as if he is behind the wheel of a body too big for him to drive. A few years pass, and this creature regains the use of his brain and speech, and I see that he was passing through a phase. Does he look back on his earlier years in embarrassment? Today, looking at "The Graduate,'' I see Benjamin not as an admirable rebel, but as a self-centered creep whose put-downs of adults are tiresome. (Anyone with average intelligence should have known, in 1967, that the word "plastics'' contained valuable advice--especially valuable for Benjamin, who lacks creative instincts and is destined to become a corporate drudge.) Mrs. Robinson is the only person in the movie who is not playing old tapes. She is bored by a drone of a husband, she drinks too much, she seduces Benjamin not out of lust but out of kindness or desperation. Makeup and lighting are used to make Anne Bancroft look older (she was 36 when the movie was made, and Hoffman was 30). But there is a scene where she is drenched in a rainstorm; we can see her face clearly and without artifice, and she is a great beauty. She is also sardonic, satirical and articulate--the only person in the movie you would want to have a conversation with.

When the movie was first released, I wrote of the "instantly forgettable'' songs by Simon and Garfunkel. History has proven me wrong. They are not forgettable. But what are they telling us? The liberating power of rock and roll is shut out of the soundtrack ("The Sound of Music'' plays on Muzak at one crucial point). The S&G songs are melodic, sophisticated, safe. They even accommodate the action, halting their lyrics and providing guitar chords to underline key moments. This is Benjamin's music; Mrs. Robinson, alone with her vodka, would twist the radio dial looking for the Beatles or Chuck Berry.

Is "The Graduate'' a bad movie? Not at all. It is a good topical movie whose time has passed, leaving it stranded in an earlier age. I give it three stars out of delight for the material it contains; to watch it today is like opening a time capsule. To know that the movie once spoke strongly to a generation is to understand how deep the generation gap ran during that extraordinary time in the late 1960s. There were true rebels in movies of the period (see "Easy Rider"), but Benjamin Braddock was not one of them. I wonder how long it took him to get into plastics.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

Now playing

Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in Two Pieces

Brian tallerico.

Sleeping Dogs

In the Land of Saints and Sinners

The Greatest Hits

Matt zoller seitz.

Amelia’s Children

Simon abrams.

Film Credits

The Graduate (1967)

106 minutes

Katharine Ross as Elaine Robinson

Murray Hamilton as Mrs. Braddock

Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson

Brian Avery as Carl Smith

William Daniels as Mr. Braddock

Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock

Buck Henry as Room Clerk

Mike Nichols-Lawrence Turman

Directed by

Mike Nichols

From a screenplay by

Calder Willingham

Screenplay by

Latest blog posts.

Ape Shall Not Kill Ape: A Look at the Entire Apes Franchise

Criterion Celebrates the Films That Forever Shifted Our Perception of Kristen Stewart

The Estate of George Carlin Destroys AI George Carlin in Victory for Copyright Protection (and Basic Decency)

The Future of the Movies, Part 3: Fathom Events CEO Ray Nutt

an image, when javascript is unavailable

Film Review: ‘The Graduate’

By A.D. Murphy

A.D. Murphy

Domestic B.0. sizzles in record July 31 years ago
$203.5 mil week makes B.O. history 31 years ago
‘Park’ propels June to new high 31 years ago

“ The Graduate ” is a delightful, satirical comedy-drama about a young man’s seduction by an older woman, and the measure of maturity which he attains from the experience. Anne Bancroft, Katharine Ross and relative newcomer Dustin Hoffman head a very competent cast. Mike Nichols directed in modern, uptight fashion, which wears well for two-thirds of the pic, and producer Lawrence Turman has supplied all the necessary props of a materialistic society. The young market, particularly, will dig this Embassy release (overseas, United Artists) and older audiences also will be amused. Strong b.o. prospects are likely in initial exclusive bookings, as a setup for a hotsy general playoff.

An excellent screenplay by Calder Willingham and comedy specialist Buck Henry, based on the Charles Webb novel, focuses on Hoffman, just out of college and wondering what it’s all about. Predatory Miss Bancroft, wife of Murray Hamilton, introduces Hoffman to mechanical sex, reaction to which evolves into true love with Miss Ross, Miss Bancroft’s daughter.

Had the story been told in terms of straight drama, it would have been one of those boring modern mellers — the hippie equivalent of a woman’s pic — in which vacant stares are supposed to convey emotion and plot action, and jazzed up cinematics become obvious and pretentious. To be sure, Nichols, in his second feature film, has laid on, with a trowel, most of the current gimmicks, but, thanks to a strong script, they are not noticeable for most of the film.

In the 70 minutes which elapse from Hoffman’s arrival home from school to the realization by Miss Ross that he has had an affair with her mother, pic is loaded with hilarious comedy and, because of this, the intended commentary on materialistic society is most effective. Only in retrospect does one realize a basic, but not overly damaging, flaw: Hoffman’s achievements in school are not credible in light of his basic shyness. No matter, or not much, anyway.

Miss Bancroft, feline and slinky in a manner very much like Lauren Bacall, is excellent, as is Miss Ross, an exciting, fresh actress from the Universal stable, who has a long career ahead of her. Hoffman is perfect in his role. William Daniels and Elizabeth Wilson play his parents in top fashion. Small, but well-cast, supporting contingent includes co-scripter Henry, as a room clerk.

Only in the final 35 minutes, as Hoffman drives up and down the LA-Frisco route in pursuit of Miss Ross, does film falter in pacing, result of which the switched-on cinematics become obvious, and therefore tiring. Vet cameraman Robert Surtees used Panavision and Technicolor to desired advantage. It would be wrong to say that Surtees has “turned on” to new techniques; more precisely, and more importantly, he is responsive to the desire for a modern look. In other words, he is a professional craftsman.

Richard Sylbert’s production design is outstanding, again. Paul Simon wrote the good songs, sung by Simon & Garfunkel, and Dave Grusin’s incidental music is equally adroit. Sam O’Steen’s editing is sharp, and other technical credits are strong. Count this one a winner for Joseph E. Levine, Turman and Nichols.

Production: Embassy Pictures release. Director Mike Nichols; Producer Lawrence Turman; Screenplay Calder Willingham, Buck Henry; Camera Robert Surtees; Editor Sam O'Steen; Music Dave Grusin; Art Director Richard Sylbert
Crew: (Color) Widescreen. Available on VHS, DVD. Original review text from Dec. 18, 1967. Running time: 105 MIN.
With: Mrs. Robinson - Anne Bancroft Ben Braddock - Dustin Hoffman Elaine Robinson - Katharine Ross Also William Daniels, Murray Hamilton, Elizabeth Wilson, Brain Avery, Walter Brooke, Norman Fell, Elizabeth Fraser, Alice Ghostley, Buck Henry, Marion Lorne.

More From Our Brands

Larry david tried so hard to avoid all emotion on the last day of filming ‘curb your enthusiasm’, abu dhabi will build a $1 billion island dedicated to gaming, nwsl’s red stars move bay fc match to wrigley field, the best loofahs and body scrubbers, according to dermatologists, why the view’s sara haines is m.i.a. this week, verify it's you, please log in.

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

Upcoming Movies and TV shows
Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

What's the Tomatometer®?
Login/signup

Movies in theaters

Opening this week
Top box office
Coming soon to theaters
Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

Netflix streaming
Prime Video
Most popular streaming movies
What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

Monkey Man Link to Monkey Man
The First Omen Link to The First Omen
The Beast Link to The Beast

New TV Tonight

Chucky: Season 3
Mr Bates vs The Post Office: Season 1
Fallout: Season 1
Franklin: Season 1
Dora: Season 1
Good Times: Season 1
Beacon 23: Season 2

The Graduate Reviews

The Graduate engages its audience almost exclusively at the level of events until the grandly satisfying conclusion, when its problems (Benjamin's problems) seem to arrive at a happy solution.

Full Review | Jun 23, 2023

You really can’t miss Bancroft’s iconic performance, but I wouldn’t blame anybody for feeling a bit disappointed by the film itself. The years have not been kind to it and it now seems shallow and overly calculated.

Full Review | Feb 1, 2023

It may not be the most tight-knit script and some key character relationships are underwritten. But anchored by some stellar performances and a great soundtrack, it’s still a lot of fun.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 21, 2022

I suggest that you see The Graduate for fun, and the hell with the next American cinema coming of age.

Full Review | Aug 10, 2022

Something that any lover of American Cinema should see.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 6, 2022

It’s hard to say which is best -- the direction, the script, or the performances by Dustin Hoffman, Katherine Ross, and Anne Bancroft. Together they achieve a major American film triumph.

Full Review | Mar 2, 2022

...a striking and thoroughly entertaining effort that boasts one of Hoffman's best performances.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 8, 2021

Even from the opening shot (after the credits), it's apparent that the cinematography and dialogue are tinged with something peculiar and undeniably unique.

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | Aug 24, 2020

Still potent, still hilarious.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 25, 2020

Every cinematic cliche, every formula plot device, every pseudo-intellectual ploy, every sentimental gimmick, every prefabricated, sure-fire boxoffice ingredient designed to empty pocketbooks and dampen hankies is present in this despicable movie.

Full Review | Feb 3, 2020

Pretends to be chic and modern, but its hero is a bewildered young dropout who cannot BEGIN to say what he dislikes about the view from his rubber raft.

Full Review | Jan 30, 2020

Over fifty years after its theatrical release, comedy-drama The Graduate manages to hold up as one of the best films of all time.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 9, 2020

All this chopped steak is a give-away on the new tone in films; unless the material is thoroughly banal, it isn't considered chic.

Full Review | Jun 19, 2019

Through Dustin Hoffman's star-making performance, through Simon & Garfunkel's now iconic soundtrack, through Mike Nichols' canny direction, The Graduate captures youth at a crossroads like no other film.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 5, 2019

Even though it captures the look and sound of much of the contemporary California scene so skillfully, The Graduate seems to me basically a copout.

Full Review | Mar 13, 2018

Watching it today I can appreciate the historical significance of The Graduate, and Mike Nichols' direction is sharp and stylish. Yet I'm ambivalent about the film.

Full Review | Jun 27, 2017

If you have never seen it, go; if you have, go again.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 27, 2017

Its pleasures and wit stand the test of time. Plus the cinematography is flat-out fantastic, like David Hockney's pool paintings made live.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 23, 2017

One of the finest films of the 1960s remains just as clever, witty and relevant today as it captures the doubts and uncertainties of a generation questioning the values of their parents.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 22, 2017

A hugely pleasurable film.

ARTS & CULTURE

When ‘the graduate’ opened 50 years ago, it changed hollywood (and america) forever.

The movie about a young man struggling to find his way in the world mesmerized the nation when it debuted

Alec Scott, Photographs by Greg Powers

One day in 1963, a movie producer named Larry Turman came across a first novel by a young Californian. “It had an emotional coloration for me like Harold Pinter,” he says. “The book was funny, but it made you nervous at the same time.” So Turman, now 91 and teaching in the University of Southern California’s film and television program, did something he advises his students never to do: He put up his own money, $1,000, to option the movie rights.

Turman’s impulse buy led to one of the most consequential films ever: The Graduate , released in December 1967. Its success—a gross of almost $105 million, the third-highest at the time—revolutionized Hollywood decision-making over which movies got made, how they were cast and to whom they were marketed. Today, the film seems as subversive as it was 50 years ago, just in different ways.

In the novel, also titled The Graduate , author Charles Webb looks back in anger at the gilded California lifestyle he had as the son of a Pasadena cardiologist. He was only 24 when he published it, and yet the book gave the film not just its main plot points—the graduate’s homecoming, his seduction by Mrs. Robinson, his pursuit of her daughter, Elaine—but also much of its best dialogue.

In grand Hollywood tradition, the film “almost didn’t get made,” says Turman. “Nobody liked the book.” His fitful search for financing led him to Joseph E. Levine (“the schlockmeister of the world,” Turman says), who put up $3 million. For a director Turman went after Mike Nichols, whose recently dissolved stand-up act with Elaine May had the same mordant streak as the book. Nichols was directing Robert Redford in the Broadway megahit Barefoot in the Park , but after Turman sent him the book, he signed on. Nichols found his screenwriter at a July Fourth pig roast at the Malibu home of Jane Fonda and her husband-to-be, the director Roger Vadim. The 1965 party has become legendary for its somewhat awkward mingling of Old Hollywood icons (Henry Fonda, William Wyler, George Cukor) with the talent that would shortly emerge as the New Hollywood (Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Jane Fonda’s brother, Peter). Somewhere between the spitted pig and the tented dance floor Nichols encountered Buck Henry, who was writing for the TV spy spoof “Get Smart,” though Henry ended up sharing credit for The Graduate with Calder Willingham, who’d written a failed first script.

In casting the leading man—Benjamin Braddock, described in the book as tall and athletic—Team Turman took its biggest risk. They passed over Redford (“Who’s going to believe Bob Redford as being sexually insecure?” Turman asks) for an unheralded, height-challenged 29-year-old Dustin Hoffman. Nichols and Henry had seen him in a small stage production of Harry, Noon and Night in New York, and Henry said Hoffman “played a crippled German transvestite, and I believed all three, no question.”

Years later, Hoffman recalled telling Nichols, “The character is five-eleven, a track star....It feels like this is a dirty trick, sir.” The director replied, “You mean you’re Jewish, that’s why you don’t think you’re right. Maybe he’s Jewish inside .” More seriously, Nichols, who was also Jewish, later said the casting of Hoffman emphasized Benjamin’s alienation from the WASP world around him. A next-generation director, Steven Soderbergh, said the choice was “the seminal event in the defining of motion picture leading men in the last 50 years.”

The Graduate

Pulsating with the rebellious spirit of the '60s and a haunting score sung by Simon and Garfunkel, The Graduate is truly a "landmark film" (Leonard Maltin).

Turman also cast against type for Mrs. Robinson. “I wanted Doris Day,” for her all-American image, he says. But she passed, so he signed Anne Bancroft, who’d won an Oscar in 1962 as the saintly Anne Sullivan in The Miracle Worker . And for Elaine Robinson, he enlisted Katharine Ross—a brunette, not a California blonde.

Simon & Garfunkel had signed on to write three songs for the film but were too busy to deliver. The editing team inserted “Sound of Silence” and “Scarborough Fair” as placeholders—and left them there. One song was new, though at Nichols’ suggestion Simon made a change: What was to have been a toast to “Mrs. Roosevelt” became “Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson.” The song became a Number 1 hit in June 1968.

Before The Graduate , film historian Mark Harris has noted, the studios believed “everything should appeal to everyone.” After the film filled theaters for two years, they realized “almost half their paying audience was under 24.” Soon James Bond and John Wayne gave way to Ratso Rizzo and Al Pacino.

The Graduate won an Oscar, for Nichols’ direction, though critical reaction was vehemently mixed. However, a retrospective viewing by Roger Ebert shows that the film is rich enough to be read differently across time. At first he, like most boomer males, got a jolt out of Benjamin’s flight from the Establishment. But for the film’s 30th anniversary, he wrote this: “Here is to you, Mrs. Robinson. You’ve survived your defeat at the hands of that insufferable creep, Benjamin, and emerged as the most sympathetic and intelligent character in The Graduate . How could I ever have thought otherwise?”

The Ascent of Ma’am

Mrs. Robinson had few predecessors but a legion of successors. Here’s a sample of post- Graduate women who pursue younger men onscreen.

Harold and Maude (1971)

Maude (Ruth Gordon) in Harold and Maude (1971)

79-year-old gets death-obsessed 20-year-old to lighten up.

Animal House (1978)

Marion Wormer ( Verna Bloom) in Animal House (1978)

The dean’s wife schools Delta House president Otter.

Class (1983)

Ellen ( Jacqueline Bisset) in Class (1983)

A woman of middle age is stunned to discover her boyfriend is 17.

Bull Durham (1988)

Annie Savoy ( Susan Sarandon) in Bull Durham (1988)

Baseball groupie dates ascendant pitcher before falling for aging catcher.

American Pie (1999)

Jeanine Stifler ( Jennifer Coolidge) in American Pie (1999)

A mom and her teen son’s friend find each other on prom night.

How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998)

Stella Payne ( Angela Bassett) in How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998)

Forty-something stockbroker vacations in Jamaica.

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993)

Betty Carver ( Mary Steenburgen) in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993)

Housewife finds temporary diversion in a dying Iowa town.

Thelma & Louise (1991)

Thelma Dickinson ( Geena Davis) in Thelma & Louise (1991)

Woman on the run stops long enough to entertain a young drifter.

Tadpole (2000)

Diane Lodder ( Bebe Neuwirth) in Tadpole (2000)

Chiropractor complicates Thanksgiving for her best friend’s 15-year-old stepson.

Kathleen Cleary Jane Seymour in Wedding Crashers (2005) Treasury secretary’s wife stalks her daughter’s suitor.

Kathleen Cleary ( Jane Seymour) in Wedding Crashers (2005)

Treasury secretary’s wife stalks her daughter’s suitor.

The Boy Next Door (2015)

Claire Peterson ( Jennifer Lopez) in The Boy Next Door (2015)

Teacher meets neighbor and soon longs for a change of address.

Home Again (2017)

Alice Kinney ( Reese Witherspoon) in Home Again (2017)

Newly separated mom goes wild for a younger man named Harry.

Get the latest Travel & Culture stories in your inbox.

A Note to our Readers Smithsonian magazine participates in affiliate link advertising programs. If you purchase an item through these links, we receive a commission.

Alec Scott | READ MORE

Alec Scott is a journalist based in San Francisco. He’s written for several publications including the Los Angeles Times and the Guardian .

Common Sense Media

Movie & TV reviews for parents

For Parents
For Educators
Our Work and Impact

Or browse by category:

Get the app
Movie Reviews
Best Movie Lists
Best Movies on Netflix, Disney+, and More

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

Best TV Lists
Best TV Shows on Netflix, Disney+, and More
Common Sense Selections for TV
Video Reviews of TV Shows

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

Book Reviews
Best Book Lists
Common Sense Selections for Books

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

Game Reviews
Best Game Lists

Common Sense Selections for Games

Video Reviews of Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

Podcast Reviews
Best Podcast Lists

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

App Reviews
Best App Lists

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

YouTube Channel Reviews
YouTube Kids Channels by Topic

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

Explaining the News to Our Kids

Family Tech Planners
Digital Skills
All Articles
Latino Culture
Black Voices
Asian Stories
Native Narratives
LGBTQ+ Pride
Best of Diverse Representation List

Celebrating Black History Month

Movies and TV Shows with Arab Leads

Celebrate Hip-Hop's 50th Anniversary

The graduate, common sense media reviewers.

Influential coming-of-age sex comedy has mature themes.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Blond, blue-eyed WASP America tacitly indicted for

No one behaves admirably. Feeling hollow and aimle

Ben rams his shoulder into a mob at a church, then

Sex is an ever-present topic. Ben has an affair wi

Infrequent use of, for example, "goddamn," "hell,"

Celebration of elaborate gifts (Alfa Romeo, scuba

Some drinking and smoking. Mrs. Robinson says she'

Positive Messages

Blond, blue-eyed WASP America tacitly indicted for oblivious privilege. Some may consider Ben's use of a cross in a church blasphemous.

Positive Role Models

No one behaves admirably. Feeling hollow and aimless after college graduation, Ben has an adulterous affair with an older woman, which makes him feel more aimless and hollow. His parents' generation seems unhappy, superficial, and devoted to material things. At best, Ben seeks more meaning in life, but even when he wins Elaine, their living meaningful lives happily is far from assured. Mrs. Robinson is a self-described alcoholic who seduces her friends' son. Breaking and entering, stalking, going by an assumed name, and premarital pregnancy all featured.

Violence & Scariness

Ben rams his shoulder into a mob at a church, then grabs a large cross on the wall and wields it threateningly to keep the crowd back. Once outside, he uses the cross to bar the door.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Sex is an ever-present topic. Ben has an affair with a married woman, then falls in love with her daughter. Mrs. Robinson, in bra, unbuttons Ben's shirt as he lies in bed, then rubs his bare chest. A few seconds of the nude Mrs. Robinson are on display. A topless dancer at a bar is covered only by tassels on her nipples while she does a seductive dance for several seconds.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Infrequent use of, for example, "goddamn," "hell," and "ass" and the epithet "wop."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Celebration of elaborate gifts (Alfa Romeo, scuba gear).

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Some drinking and smoking. Mrs. Robinson says she's an alcoholic.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Graduate is a unique classic comedy charting an affair between a young man and a married friend of his parents. Much time is spent on the initial seduction and subsequent clandestine meetings in hotel rooms. Though no graphic depictions of intercourse are shown, there are brief shots of female nudity during the seduction and later in a nightclub scene, where a woman strips down to underwear and pasties. Language is fairly restrained, with a few minor curse words, such as "ass" or "damn" used sparingly. Many of the adults drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes very casually. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

Parents say (14)
Kids say (20)

Based on 14 parent reviews

Classical Film: Best Viewed Age 16+

Mature themes appropriate for college kids or adults, what's the story.

In THE GRADUATE, after Benjamin Braddock ( Dustin Hoffman ) leaves college, he's disinterested in everything, career-related or not. A family friend, Mrs. Robinson ( Anne Bancroft ), propositions him with an offer of casual sex. The affair seems to bring Benjamin a certain level of contentment. Soon Ben finds problems with their relationship and develops an interest in the Robinsons' daughter, Elaine ( Katherine Ross ), much to Mrs. Robinson's disapproval.

Is It Any Good?

This intriguing comedy was influential in that the plot seems to build toward an energetic climax, but the actual closing moments are listless, providing little closure. This way of leaving a film open-ended and unsettled, above all else, influenced many of the cinematic treasures of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period that most look back on as golden days of motion-picture history.

Much has been said about the success and aftershocks of the release of The Graduate in 1967. Certainly its deadpan humor and the main character's palpable sense of unease resonated with audience members steeped in the rising counterculture movement. It stands as a document of an era. The lush soundtrack by Simon and Garfunkel underscores a pervasive melancholy while also giving certain quiet moments an astounding serenity -- a marriage of pop music and film that influenced many later films.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how well The Graduate has aged. Does Benjamin's lack of direction upon graduating seem applicable today, or is it more reflective of the state of youth in the '60s?

Parents definitely will want to address Ben's complicated relationship with Mrs. Robinson. Does she seem genuinely interested in Benjamin? If not, what might her motives be in seducing him?

Why does Elaine seem to gain appeal for Benjamin when Mrs. Robinson forbids him to see her?

Would you consider this movie to be a classic? Why, or why not?

Movie Details

In theaters : December 22, 1967
On DVD or streaming : December 7, 1999
Cast : Anne Bancroft , Dustin Hoffman , Katharine Ross
Director : Mike Nichols
Studio : MGM/UA
Genre : Comedy
Run time : 105 minutes
MPAA rating : PG
Last updated : April 18, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

Our editors recommend.

Harold and Maude

Want personalized picks for your kids' age and interests?

Indie Films

Mockumentaries for teens.

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

Why Do We Love “The Graduate”?

By Jacob R. Brackman

A still of Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate lying down in bed with his hand on his chin.

“We thought we had a commercial picture here, but we didn’t know what we had,” an Embassy Pictures official said to me. He was marvelling at the success of “The Graduate.” Joseph E. Levine, who is the president of Embassy Pictures, and who was in a large financial hole before “The Graduate” started paying off, marvelled, too, in a press release of this spring: “It’s absolutely incredible. There’s no way to describe it. It’s like an explosion, a dam bursting. The business just grows and grows and grows. Wherever we’ve played it, whatever the weather, it’s a sell-out attraction. And people have been coming back two and three times to see it again. I haven’t seen anything like this in all the years I’ve been in the business. . . .” So far, “The Graduate” has been shown in some nine hundred and fifty theatres, in almost as many cities of the United States and Canada, and from early figures the experts can now accurately project the degree of a movie’s long-term success. “The Graduate” has broken house records in about forty per cent of its engagements. In New York, in its first week it broke the house record at each of the two theatres it played in—the Coronet and the Lincoln Art. In its sixth and seventh weeks, it broke both records again. In its first six months, it grossed more than thirty-five million dollars in the nine hundred and fifty theatres—more than two million of it in New York. Whereas most films taper off after an initial spurt, its business continues to swell, just as Mr. Levine indicated; the receipts still haven’t peaked. From its performance thus far, Levine predicts that “The Graduate” will become the highest-grossing film in motion-picture history. Howard Taubman, of the Times , agrees that it will outgross even “The Sound of Music.”

Of course, box-office isn’t the only measure of a motion picture’s success. Like the Beatles, “The Graduate” has met with favor from every level of brow. Critically, it hasn’t been a controversial movie—like, say, “Bonnie and Clyde.” Two or three reviewers greeted it with mild enthusiasm; the rest, even hard-to-please critics, were wild about it. Stanley Kauffmann wrote in the New Republic , “ ‘The Graduate’ gives some substance to the contention that American films are coming of age—of our age. . . . [It is] a milestone in American film history.” It was included in the Ten Best lists of Newsweek , the Saturday Review , Cue , the National Board of Review, and a score of newspapers, including the Times . It won five of the seven Golden Globe Awards (Best Comedy, Best Director, Best Actress in a Comedy, and Best Male and Female Newcomers), was nominated for seven Academy Awards, and won the Oscar for Best Director. It was the subject of an essay question, on pre-marital sex, in a final exam at an Eastern women’s college. Its theme song—“Mrs. Robinson,” by Simon and Garfunkel—reached No. 1 on pop charts. And, as Variety says, the word-of-mouth is fabulous. “The Graduate” seems to have, in the Embassy official’s words, “a very special appeal, on both sides of the generation gap.” Indeed, it seems to have become something of a cultural phenomenon—a nearly mandatory movie experience, which can be discussed in gatherings that cross the boundaries of age and class. It also seems to be one of those propitious works of art which support the theory that we are no longer necessarily two publics—the undiscerning and the demanding—for whom separate kinds of entertainment must be provided. Its sensational profits suggest that Hollywood can have both its cake and its art. Filmmakers of lofty aspirations have long protested that enormous production expenses make it impossible to finance “really good, strong stuff,” because it won’t appeal to enough people to pay for itself. “The Graduate” seems to be telling us that the public has been underrated. Due weight having been given to such factors as economic achievement, popularity at different age and social levels, and critical reception by mass and élite media, it is clearly the biggest success in the history of the movies. Whatever is authentic or meretricious in “The Graduate” must reflect what is authentic or meretricious in our sentiment about its themes, and perhaps even in America’s current conceptions of itself. To some people, this statement will sound absurdly hyperbolic (after all, why set out to go on so about a film comedy?), but my feeling is that we are living in a time when the uses of a Brillo box can be as telling as a State of the Union Message, and that a uniquely celebrated movie may be worth a pretty close look.

I like reading both about movies I’ve seen and about movies I haven’t seen, but I often find myself irritated in the first case by superfluous chunks of expository briefing sprinkled through a text and in the second case by having to pick out and piece together the rudiments of the plot from clues, usually nonsequential, that are buried here and there amid the writer’s own reflections. So, although it’s not necessarily an ideal scheme, I’ll set down here most of what happens in “The Graduate.” Since its television trailer gave away the dénouement, I can include even that with an easy conscience.

The graduate is a young man named Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), who returns home to suburban Los Angeles from an Eastern college for the summer, loaded with credentials of glory, and at loose ends about what to do next. The evening after evening Benjamin’s arrival, his wealthy parents throw a party for their friends, more or less in his honor. Wishing to be left alone with his confusion, Benjamin tries to hide out in his room, away from the verbal cheek-pinching. Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), the wife of his father’s partner, eventually corners him, and tricks and bullies him into driving her home, escorting her inside, having a drink, and engaging in a disconcertingly intimate conversation. She inveigles him up to her absent daughter’s bedroom, where she takes off her clothes and makes him a standing offer of herself. Benjamin, first miserable and then perfectly frantic through these stampeding events, is saved only by the arrival of Mr. Robinson. The two men have a nightcap together. Mr. Robinson, kindly paternal to the point of senility, urges Benjamin to take out his daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross), who is now away at Berkeley. Some time later (after we have seen a bit more of Benjamin’s aimlessness and of the amiable obtuseness of his parents and their set), Benjamin telephones Mrs. Robinson. During and after the call, many minutes of comical footage illustrate Benjamin’s halfheartedness, awkwardness, sexual ingenuousness, and, of course, agony. There’s a painful meeting with Mrs. R. in a hotel bar; a long sequence in which Benjamin engages a room under a false name from a clerk who he imagines suspects his designs; a furtive pay-phone call to cement arrangements with Mrs. R.; more funny business underscoring Benjamin’s nervousness as he waits in the trysting room; and, at length, a remarkably unpleasant interview with Mrs. R. when she arrives, obviously intent upon getting down to business without amenities. Benjamin tries to back out at the last minute. Mrs. R. goads him on by suggesting that he is a virgin and is sexually inadequate. In a spirit of defensive anger, he comes across.

For the next few weeks, Benjamin hangs around his house by day—sunning, floating on an air mattress in the back-yard pool, avoiding his father’s questions about plans—and, by night, meets Mrs. R. at the hotel, where they conduct a tense, conversationless affair. Mr. Robinson has meanwhile enlisted Mr. Braddock in his campaign to get Benjamin together with his daughter. Benjamin jokingly brings the subject up with Mrs. R., and she makes him swear never to see Elaine. After Elaine arrives on vacation, however, parental pressure for a friendly date increases, and at last, in order to avoid a threatened Braddock-Robinson soirée, Benjamin does ask her out. Mrs. R. is livid. Elaine appears: the classy embodiment of a college man’s most extravagant fantasies. Benjamin, consummately rude, takes her to a cheap strip joint for a drink. After trying to be pleasant for both of them, Elaine rushes out in tears. Benjamin catches up to her, explains that the date was his parents’ idea, and apologizes. In the next scene, they are eating at a teen-agers’ drive-in, relaxed and chatty. When he drives her home, much later than he had expected to, neither wants to end the evening. The only place around that is still open turns out to be the hotel that Benjamin has been using for his assignations with Mrs. R., and he becomes flustered into a hasty exit when various attendants greet him as Mr. Gladstone. Back in the car, Elaine asks him if he is having an affair with someone. He acknowledges an involvement with a married woman (“with a son”) but says it is decidedly a thing of the past.

The next day, Benjamin drives up to the Robinsons’ house in the rain to pick up Elaine, as they had arranged, but Mrs. R. hops into his car and orders him to drive around the block. When he demurs at her demand that he never see Elaine again, she threatens to tell all. Benjamin stops the car and races back to the Robinsons’ through driving rain. He runs up the stairs and barges into Elaine’s bedroom, and as he begins to tell her how that married woman he’d been having an affair with wasn’t just any married woman, Mrs. Robinson, drenched and haggard-looking, appears in the doorway behind him. Elaine gets the picture and shrieks at him to get out.

Benjamin keeps an eye on her from a distance until she goes back to school, then stews around home for a couple of weeks longer. One day, he announces to his parents that he has decided to marry Elaine, and drives up to Berkeley, where he takes a furnished room and continues to shadow her. After days of espionage, he accosts her on a bus, pretending, with no particular conviction, that he has run into her by accident. Elaine, who is on her way to meet a date at the zoo, converses with him icily . Benjamin doggedly tags along until her date, a blond medical student named Carl Smith, gives him the old brushoff. Shortly thereafter, Elaine shows up unannounced in Benjamin’s room, demanding to know what he is doing in Berkeley after raping her mother. Benjamin tries inarticulately to straighten her out; she screams him down. Late that night, she appears again, and asks for a kiss. Benjamin proposes marriage. After several days of indecision, she tentatively agrees. Then Mr. Robinson, having learned of his family’s plight, shows up at Benjamin’s room, promises to put him behind bars if he ever comes near his wife or his daughter again, and leaves hollering that Benjamin is filth, scum, a degenerate. Too much shouting. The landlord, who took Benjamin for an agitator from the start, orders him out. Elaine has disappeared from her dormitory.

Benjamin drives back to Los Angeles and goes straight to the Robinsons’ house, entering unannounced. Mrs. R. informs him, with glacial cordiality, that Elaine is getting married to Carl Smith, and calls the police to have him arrested as a robber. Benjamin takes off, and embarks upon a three-day mad dash to intercept Elaine at the altar—posing first, in a fraternity-house dining hall and locker room, as a friend of Carl’s, and then, over a pay phone in Santa Barbara, as Carl’s minister uncle. On his way to the church, he runs out of gas. He races the remaining distance on foot, and reaches a glass-enclosed balcony of the church just as the young Smiths are completing their vows. At the moment when the couple kiss, Benjamin begins banging on the glass and crying Elaine’s name. She sees him and, for a protracted moment, walks blankly up the aisle toward him. Then she cries out to him, and everyone springs into action. Benjamin gallops down the stairs, Mr. Robinson runs to the rear of the church to head him off, Elaine fights her way through the crowd, everybody starts screaming. In the melee that ensues, Benjamin elbows Mr. R. in the ribs, knocks him down, and then grabs a cross from the wall and swings it like a mace to ward off the attacking horde. Mrs. R. slaps Elaine across the face, screaming “It’s too late!” Elaine shouts “Not for me!” and runs out with Benjamin. He bars the door with the cross, locking the entire wedding party inside. The two of them—Benjamin grubby from his three-day chase, Elaine immaculate in her bridal gown—run, grinning wildly, across the broad church lawn and hail a passing bus. The last shots show them sitting exhausted and expressionless in the rear seat, oblivious of the stares of their fellow-passengers.

The tensions of the first third of the movie—ending with Benjamin’s phone call to Mrs. Robinson—arise from the question: What is Benjamin going to do with himself? Mike Nichols, the director, handles its exposition boldly, and we are given every reason to expect that what the movie will try to do is answer it. In more general terms, the first part of the film seems to be asking what it means to be a promising young man in America today. What does it add up to now, in this country, to be twenty-one, with a high-quality education behind you and a brilliant future ahead of you? Naturally gifted, with a family of wealth and position to back him up, an impressive degree, a fellowship award, the ability to excel in almost any career he might choose, Benjamin exists, as the film opens, in that condition of voluptuous potentiality which is supposed to define young men. The condition fills him with anguish and confusion. And this is fine material for a story, because what was once a predicament confined to the sons of a tiny élite has become a mass predicament in middle-class America. The shared assumptions about what one will do with oneself no longer hold together. Not only is Benjamin interesting to us because of the predicament he is in; he could not be interesting, and perhaps not even recognizable as a youth, if he weren’t in it. We could no longer be taken with a young man who stood smiling confidently upon the threshold of his future as a doctor or a businessman. Benjamin’s parents and their friends struggled, we can assume, to achieve what hard times had denied their parents. For Benjamin to make their youthful hopes his own would be preposterous. A son can pursue ambitions that his parents cherished and failed to fulfill but not ambitions that they fulfilled and then found wanting. From Benjamin’s vantage point, his parents and their friends exist in a world of murmuring emptiness. Upon his arrival home, he finds himself surrounded by fawning adults who have, in a way that escapes them, made a mess of their lives. He sees himself on the threshold only of making a mess of his own life. In the first segment of the film, Nichols himself occupies this limited vantage point so thoroughly as to make Benjamin’s perceptions his own, and the audience’s. He has managed to translate Benjamin’s vision of adult grotesquerie into such striking cinematic terms that even the most conventional moviegoers are hard pressed to see through Benjamin’s problem along such lines as “Spoiled brat, what’s he bellyaching about? My kid should have it so good!” Nichols’ conception, early in the film, is uncompromisingly anti-adult—perhaps the most anti-adult ever to come out of Hollywood. In the party scene, he uses huge, smothering closeups to impose Benjamin’s claustrophobia on the audience when his parents seek to show him off as part of their panoply of success. Even though Benjamin is in a position to accomplish no more, really, than they have accomplished, the guests claw at him hungrily. A tippler promises Benjamin the single word that will unlock the riddle of his future, draws him out onto the patio, and whispers portentously, “Plastics.” Benjamin seems momentarily stunned. Even, or precisely, through our laughter, something inside us cries out, with him, “No, that cannot be the word! That must be the opposite of the word!” But Benjamin can’t escape the clutches of the people who seem to live by it—except by standing at the dark bottom of his parents’ pool, breathing from a scuba tank.

A quick survey of parents who have seen “The Graduate” has turned up only a few who fancied Benjamin the villain of the piece. (For these, his mother and father were “bad” only insofar as they’d “spoiled” him.) Most, if they didn’t exactly identify themselves with Benjamin, were at least on his side , in an avuncular way. They managed to feel this sympathy by seeing Benjamin’s parents as terribly extreme. Parents who are in life as intellectually vulgar as the Braddocks urged their children to go to the movie and see how lucky they were. (“We aren’t that bad, are we, Andy?”) Actually, Mr. Braddock is a more reasonable figure than the usual suburban stereotype, that Hollywood blending of Jewish and wasp garishness—say, the father from Darien in “Auntie Mame,” who could be ridiculed because of his bigotry. There is some boldness to the disparagement of Braddock’s fatherhood. Braddock stands for nothing readily impugnable; he simply fails to stand for anything worthy of respect. The film condemns him because he is not a fit model, and because his ambitions for his son are misguided. Indeed, no one gives Benjamin any sense of direction, much less inspiration. Had there been a single great teacher—or, for that matter, a great hanger-on—back at his nameless Eastern college, he would not be quite so mopily lost. His adulthood looks bleak largely because his environment offers no decent ideal of adulthood—not even a clue to what that ideal might be.

The question posed in the middle third of the film, which ends when Benjamin realizes he’s in love with Elaine, is: How is he going to get out of his affair with Mrs. Robinson? We know that an entanglement with a married woman—especially one so awful—can come to no good end, and that the movie, in order to resolve itself, is going to have to get Benjamin out of it and into something else. More important, we understand that the whole Robinson episode is but a distraction from the problem of Benjamin’s future—worse than a distraction, though, for it helps make up the very syndrome Benjamin wants no part of. Mechanical sex—a bitchy adultery—is as indispensable to the vacuous suburban scene as a few tall, cool ones hoisted over the hibachi. Mrs. Robinson might be his emblem for the plastic world. Benjamin knows he can devote no attention to mapping out his life as long as he has her to deal with. We feel that “The Graduate” will have to return to its initial theme, which the affair has futilely tried to evade

The question we expect the final third to answer is something like: Will Benjamin find his way back to his initial dilemma, come to terms with it at last, and resolve it? Or, at least, we would expect such a question if we could halt the progress of the film until we were ready to proceed, the way we lay a book down on our lap to mull over what has happened and anticipate what is to come. Luckily for “The Graduate,” film affords no opportunity for immediate reflection, except at the risk of missing out on the ongoing action. For this reason, we must replay movies (or their most interesting parts, anyway) in our minds, and judge them largely in retrospect. We do watch movies in our minds rather as we read books: slow the pace at will to get into a particular scene, or even stop the action to get into a single frame; pause to take stock of what the author is doing to us; turn backward to reëxamine something that we didn’t realize would become important. (Marshall McLuhan might dismiss all this as clinging to linear-text methodologies, but I think most people go over movies this way. A number of film critics, one gathers, try to perform the same mental operations while they are actually watching a film. Not only can they not do it; they keep missing more. They go back mentally to retrieve something, only to discover that they hadn’t fully caught it the first time around.) Many films mellow in leisurely recollection; perhaps a fine film must. But “The Graduate,” although it is terrific fun to watch, begins to fall apart under reflection. The final third, in which the best scenes occur, is able to preoccupy us only as long as light is still flickering on the screen. Just when we have greeted Elaine as the catalytic agent to extricate Benjamin from his distracting entanglement with her mother, just when we have braced ourselves for a renewed confrontation with his future, the film, hurtling relentlessly onward, places terrible obstacles between Benjamin and Elaine. Soon it loses sight of its initial problem entirely The winning of Elaine, which we might properly have regarded as a preliminary step on Benjamin’s road to deliverance, supplants the very question of deliverance. As we watch him driving up to Berkeley from Los Angeles, his Alfa Romeo gliding swiftly across the Bay Bridge, he is changing inside. Suddenly, we see him behaving like a man of absolute purpose—a man who knows what he wants and fights for it. Suddenly, he is overflowing with energy and sense of direction. After moping aimlessly through two-thirds of the picture, he is transformed, through his pursuit of Elaine, into the conventional man, resolved upon his chase. On these terms, his success is assured. Once you really know what you’re after, in the movies, it’s mostly a question of going out and getting it.

Despite its bizarre antecedents, the last few hundred feet of the film have a healthy American quality: Benjamin and his girl racing across a green lawn, he in his chinos and stained windbreaker, weary with work well done, and she in her lovely white wedding dress, looking so pure. And she is pure, as far as we know—the first pure flesh amid the plastic. However unnatural what led up to it may have been, they will have a proper wedding night! The clambering onto the bus filled with good common folk. Off on their honeymoon! “What crazy things happen in—well, America!” Somehow, the elation of the scene is almost untainted by any residue of Benjamin’s confusion, or by the “bad” implications of the relationship. The unseen bourgeois, looking very much like the man who spoke the single word “Plastics,” puts his arm fraternally around our shoulder: “See—the kid just needed a sweet little woman to straighten him out.” And we, perhaps clinging to a last-ditch reservation, ask, “But what about his marrying the daughter on the basis of nothing , after he’d been sleeping with the mother, the wife of his father’s partner, who looks so much like his own mother?” And the voice replies, “Are you talking about these two lovely American kids? Sitting in the bus there? Are you going to try and make something nasty out of that?” “For once,” wrote Stanley Kauffmann, “a happy ending makes us feel happy.”

“The Graduate” engages its audience almost exclusively at the level of events until the grandly satisfying conclusion, when its problems (Benjamin’s problems) seem to arrive at a happy solution. The pace of the film is swift and smooth, but its emotional progress—its movement toward resolution—is deeply illogical. The ending does answer the question: How will Benjamin get to marry Elaine, whom he loves? But this union—indeed, the entire boy-meets-loses-gets-girl theme—shapes into a line of resolution only after “The Graduate” is two-thirds over. At one level, the film proceeds awkwardly, deceptively, through a series of less and less interesting problems, sidestepping difficulties of its own authorship, until it can solve only the least interesting of them. All that remains when the bus drives Benjamin and Elaine off into a presumably roseate adulthood is the bare convention of young love triumphant. The trials that Benjamin seemed to forget once he had fixed upon getting the girl, we, too, are encouraged to forget.

Benjamin’s acquisition of Elaine is not an apt resolution of Charles Webb’s novel “The Graduate,” either—the book from which the movie was adapted—but then Webb doesn’t try to pass it off as one. The book is peculiarly spare for a long piece of fiction, reading more like a scenario treatment than a novel. In the manner of a scenario, Webb’s book tries to float its meanings on the surface of events—on easily visible changes in attitude and setting, and on what characters say rather than on what they think and feel.

In the book, Benjamin’s sudden infatuation with Elaine seems purposely unmotivated. Nothing about her presents a good reason for his falling in love with her. The novel, in dialogue that is omitted from the film, makes this abundantly clear at a number of points. For example:

He nodded. “So,” he said, taking her hand. “We’re getting married then.” “But Benjamin?” she said. “What.” “I can’t see why I’m so attractive to you.” “You just are.” “But why.” “You just are, I said. You’re reasonably intelligent. You’re striking looking.” “Striking?” “Sure.” “My ears are too prominent to be striking looking.” Benjamin frowned at her ears. “They’re all right,” he said.

What was, then, an artful point in the novel is wholly lost in the movie: the fact that Benjamin’s precipitate and (one wants to say “therefore”) consuming love for Elaine makes very little sense. We find ourselves sucked in by a cinematic convention: That’s how people fall in love in the movies; it doesn’t have to make sense. Katharine Ross’s scrumptiousness becomes a more than sufficient cause. Yet because the romance has now grown crucial to the scheme of Benjamin’s life, because we are encouraged to imagine Elaine as the light at the end of his darkness, the film seems suddenly top-heavy. The affair—the preliminary relationship—has been pictured in endless detail; now the love that promises salvation is treated skimpily.

In the film, when Elaine tells Benjamin she doesn’t want him to leave Berkeley until he has “some definite plan,” we appreciate only her coy desire for him to stay—a certain bubble-headed righteousness that Miss Ross makes adorable. In the book, we never overcome the anxiety created in us by Benjamin’s planlessness. Elaine perpetually reminds him, and us, that she is a distraction: “ ‘Well, I just think you’re wasting your time sitting around in this room,’ she said. ‘Or sitting around in a room with me if we got married.’ ” Webb can permit such revealing lines because although he lets his protagonist escape from the essential, he isn’t trying to pretend otherwise. Nichols could not have included Elaine’s keen remark; it is fundamental to his upbeat resolution of the movie that we do not stop to reconsider Elaine’s relation to Benjamin’s anguish about his life. Nichols cannot let us leave the theatre feeling that nothing has changed, so he gives us what he thinks we want by packing the last thirty minutes with passages of tremendous emotional power. The passages begin when Benjamin finds Mr. Robinson waiting in his room (Hoffman’s terrified scream is perfect), and keep coming, all but torrentially, until the final hundred feet of film. Their tension has to do with the horror of confronting brute, implacable stupidity— wrongheadedness —in others. With the over-obvious exception of Benjamin, people all appear to see the world so wackily that, like Benjamin, we have no idea what would be involved in getting them to see it straight. The adults will sacrifice him, and sacrifice Elaine, too. There is no reasoning with them. They cannot “win” (Elaine will obviously get an annulment; the couple can no longer be kept apart), but they will still destroy Benjamin, pointlessly, if they can. If he doesn’t escape with his girl, they’ll crack his head against a pew and have him thrown in jail.

Like Benjamin’s graduation party, the wedding guests are all middle-aged and elderly people. (Don’t kids in California ever get to invite any of their friends?) Benjamin’s creators have thus provided him with an absolutely sound reason for a thinly disguised orgy of parricide—or plain adulticide. If he lit into the congregation without the perfect rationale of self-defense, the scene would appear vengeful, even sadistic. But because the adults’ mindless attack seems to leave him no alternative his aggression seems fitting. The scene takes on overtones of Jesus driving the moneylenders from the temple. An author must manipulate his plot skillfully to legitimize so impermissible a release. Webb swung into his most dramatic pose:

Mr. Robinson drove in toward him and grabbed him around the waist. Benjamin twisted away, but before he could reach Elaine he felt Mr. Robinson grabbing at his neck and then grabbing at the collar of his shirt and pulling him backward and ripping the shirt down his back. He spun around and slammed his fist into Mr. Robinson’s face. Mr. Robinson reeled backward and crumpled into a corner.

Nichols has muted the smash to the face into an elbow to the solar plexus, but Mr. Robinson still lands senseless on the floor, and the scene begins to build to an Oedipal jubilee. If Benjamin could have handled the situation in any other way, or if he had really injured Mr. Robinson (or had killed him), Nichols might have led his young audiences to feel the guilt that lies just beyond, and sometimes mingles with, triumph. But “The Graduate”’s solution aims at gratifying not our understanding of its problems but our insecurities about them. Snatching away the bride at the altar—a pleasing fantasy that has turned up in movies often, at least since “It Happened One Night” and “The Philadelphia Story”—is regenerated by an inspired directorial stroke. Benjamin arrives after —instead of, as in the novel and in previous films, before—the ceremony is over. Benjamin’s crying out to Elaine before the vows would mean simply “Don’t marry him! Marry me!” After the sacramental kiss, his cry means “It doesn’t matter that you married him—or that I slept with your mother! We know what is real!” The chase to the altar puts us in a familiar frame of mind: we forget that the vows are only a ritual; the chase assumes a conventional urgency— maybe he will be too late! Then Nichols craftily steps outside the convention.

The wedding finale has been compared, largely because of its disruptiveness, with the wedding scene in “Morgan!” Yet there was no chance that Morgan would “get” Vanessa Redgrave; his busting up the post-wedding party meant simply that he’d gone over the brink, fallen victim to his unbalanced fantasies. Where Morgan hurts and humiliates no one but himself, Benjamin, like an Ivy League Douglas Fairbanks, outmaneuvers and routs the hostile wedding party. Anyone who has seen “The Graduate” when a fair number of young people were in the audience can have had no doubt about what was happening. Benjamin’s contemporaries aren’t apprehensive about his escaping safely; they stomp and hoot and cheer when he plows into the cluster of parents. And when he starts swinging the cross like a battle-axe they go wild. Hip Negro audiences respond the same way when Sidney Poitier returns the Southern patrician’s genteel slap in “In the Heat of the Night,” or when Jimmy Brown gets to slug a couple of white men—enemy soldiers—in “The Dirty Dozen.” Kids at “The Graduate” can let go because Benjamin kicks hell out of a whole entourage of parents—and with an unassailable motive. As far as I know, no movie has ever shown a black man beating up a white man outside a war setting (though in life it’s not uncommon)—not even in a situation that favors the white man. But one can imagine a screenplay with sufficient art to justify a Negro’s physically humiliating a crowd of dreadful whites. Like Benjamin, he would have to have no choice but the ordinarily forbidden.

Benjamin’s battle for Elaine is so sudden and ferocious that we involve ourselves in it completely. When they finally escape their tormentors, and the tension of the chase is relaxed, our relief is consummate. To Nichols’ credit, he has not permitted “The Graduate” to fade front the screen on a shot of the couple in a clinch, or even on grins of idiotic triumph. They stare blankly ahead, because at last things have stopped happening at a preoccupying clip. Now they have a chance to consider the momentous consequences of what they have done, and the difficulties that lie ahead. This final moment of thoughtfulness—Nichols has painstakingly established the use of full-screen expressionless faces to indicate thought and emotion—lessens only slightly the exuberant tone of his finale. But after the lights go on in the theatre we, for our part, have a chance to realize that Benjamin’s capture of Elaine was, at the outside, a secondary aim. What, after all, is Benjamin going to do with his life? Do we infer from the vigor of his pursuit, and from the conventionality of Elaine, that they will soon be discussing a mortgage on a split-level in Tarzana? That the whole “problem” upon which the film established itself was just a sort of “post-grad blues”—a phase that Benjamin simply had to be jolted out of? Or are these clues illusory? Will Benjamin now, with Elaine in tow, return to grapple with the confusions that unsettled him before the Robinson ladies turned up? These are crucial questions, and “The Graduate” has balked at them. Indeed, Nichols recently told a group of college-newspaper editors that as the movie ends, the real problems are just beginning (we must assume that Benjamin somehow needed Elaine before he could face them), and that the marriage would never work out. Nichols’ remarks were surprising, for none of their pertinent, even crucial extensions come across in his dénouement. The last third of the film implies either that “The Graduate” is about a boy passing through a difficult stage on his way to Normality or that Elaine represents, at best, Benjamin’s cowardly desire to simplify the complex issues of his life-to-be. (At worst, he has fixed upon her as a distraction, exactly as he fixed upon her mother.) The option is hardly satisfactory, so most of the critics have steadfastly ignored the evidence of the text and insisted that Benjamin’s long search for himself arrives at its payoff. The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin , typically, informed us that “The Graduate” is “rooted in the affirmative premise that the young can escape the traps of a society created by their parents.” And Glamour explained Benjamin’s barely controlled hysteria at the wedding by saying, “He doesn’t care what other people think because [now] he knows who he is. That’s growing up.”

The condition of being altogether lost may be unbearable; it is understandable that people usually take false roads out. The false roads don’t lead toward being found, exactly, or toward any particular wisdom, but at least they allow one a comforting feeling of movement, an illusion of progress—at least they consume energy. For an artist to detour onto such roads is also understandable, I suppose; in any event, it happens often enough. Resisting the lure of such detours and remaining still, in stark perplexity, to watch and listen is the nerviest course, in art as in life. The artist cannot afford to let himself get away with things; if he does, he cheats his characters and, consequently, his audience. If he cannot long maintain himself in the condition of being lost, he cannot long maintain his characters in that condition, either, because he has no sure sense of where it leads, or even of what its resolution might look like. He grows adept not at solving problems but at overcoming them—transmuting them, removing them, “settling” them, directing them toward false outcomes. The higher an artist’s distractibility is, the less tenaciously he clings to the essential, and the easier, and emptier, his aesthetic choices become.

Though we all identify European movies by naming their directors, film buffs who refer to American movies that way have seemed a little pedantic. Familiar though we are with the axiom that European auteurs produce unmistakably personal visions, we have seen Hollywood movies, even the movies of our most “distinctive” directors, as committee efforts. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was the Burton-Taylor movie or, in certain circles, the Albee movie. But “The Graduate” is, definitively, the Mike Nichols movie. In fact, it has given everybody the chance to be a movie buff; that is, to talk about the director . Even its actors, in interviews, have tried to turn attention away from the themselves toward Nichols. The critics—including some who usually scorn auteur notions—tended overwhelmingly to speak of “The Graduate”’s success in terms of Nichols’ success. Many of them called him a genius. The New York Film Critics and the Motion Picture Academy elected “In the Heat of the Night” Best Picture, but both groups chose Nichols over Norman Jewison (and Arthur Penn) as Best Director. The Directors’ Guild of America also gave Nichols its annual award. John Allen wrote in the Christian Science Monitor , “The director . . . has [hereby] announced his candidacy for election to the upper chamber of filmmakers now occupied by Fellini, Truffaut, Antonioni, and others of their calibre. Mr. Nichols, as a director whose sure control shapes and colors every frame of film with a distinctive, recognizable style, is almost sure of election. . . . Mr. Nichols is everywhere, blending, coloring, illuminating. He gives to ‘The Graduate’ that special brilliance that occurs when all the right lights are filtered through the proper prism: his touch as a director is a veritable chandelier of finely cut crystal.” Will Jones wrote more or less the same thing in the Minneapolis Tribune .” Everybody asks why the Americans don’t make movies the way Europeans do, right? Okay, buddies, here’s European moviemaking done right in the heart of American movieville. Hey, there, Schlesinger, Richardson, Antonioni, Truffaut . . . can little Mikey Nichols come play with your gang? You bet.” Nichols said recently, rather as if biting the hands that had fed him so generously, “Critics are like eunuchs watching a gang-bang. They must truly be ignored.” The fact is that critical hungers have been working in Nichols’ favor. Americans want to feel good about what is being produced here. In the early nineteenth century, when Continental literati scoffed, “Who ever read an American book?,” our critics often fell into a similar aesthetic chauvinism; this or that new author was always promising to take his place beside the European masters. A century later, when American movie pioneers set the pace for the international field, the heirs of those critics were quick to claim cinema as a fully legitimate medium for art. But its rapid industrialization—the demand for “something for everyone,” to insure maximum returns on huge production investments—soon dictated a cinema not of truth or beauty but of wish fulfillment: of prosperity, romance, and moral simplicity. At least since the end of the Second World War, with the flourishing of Italian neo-realism and, later, the French nouvelle vague , American entertainment has been forced back into the shadow of European art. Our cultural insecurity vis-à-vis the Old World is at work again. Oppressed by the confusions of the times, we look for the film genius who will do for us what Rossellini, Visconti, De Sica, Fellini, Antonioni, and Olmi have done for the Italians. It is an immense task, granted, but we cannot afford to accept less from our first mid-century genius. He must give this frazzled country some feeling for itself, for its contradictions and despairs, even as it goes through changes that make the job almost impossible.

Not altogether unlike Benjamin, Nichols has long existed on the verge, in a portentous condition of promise. He had a way of shrugging off his unbroken string of successes (five stage and two Hollywood hits out of seven tries) which made them appear playful warmups for some grand feat of art. Because his mastery over “unworthy vehicles” seemed consummate—because, in other words, he had attempted nothing in the theatre that strained at the limits of his talent—people considered him “better” than anything he had done showed him to be. Nearly every artist secretly thinks of himself in this way, but Nichols’ recent public statements suggests that critical overestimations of “The Graduate” may have momentarily beguiled him into presuming that the quality we are willing to attribute to him can already be found in his work.

Nichols has provided his film with the texture, if not the substance, of contemporaneity. Like “Blow-Up,” and more than any other recent American film, “The Graduate” has the look of today. The Berkeley students look like Berkeley students—not like Berkeley students of a dozen years ago, or like a middle-aged conservative’s nightmare of Berkeley students, or like a pop huckster’s souped-up Berkeley students. (Nichols is reported to have salted his crowd with casting-agency hippies. He evidently has an exceptional eye for extras.) Similarly, his camera has captured the exact appearance of a contingent of senior citizens, a nouveau-riche poolside lawn party, a Berkeley student boarding house, an Ivy League-type locker room, a suburban Los Angeles den. The care that Nichols has devoted to surface reality infuses into familiar personalities and their backgrounds a recognizability uncommon in American films (and virtually nonexistent on television). There’s something thrilling in that accomplishment—something rather like the strange excitement of overhearing one’s name mentioned—but his ability to capture our surroundings gives him an authority he does not merit on the subject of the feelings we experience in them.

Nichols also seems determined to weaken the impact of his settings with an almost random series of cinematic tricks. Unusual ways of photographing the details of physical reality—the simple fact of things—are supposed to comment upon the camera’s objects, upon what is really there. Presumably, a director uses the perspectives of his camera (its lens distortions, its angle of vision, its filter coloration, its distance, the suddenness of its attention) to indicate the proper attitude toward the visual facts, more or less as a writer chooses between words to suggest his own viewpoint. The way it works out most often in movies, of course, is that a director tosses off variations in perspective in a spirit of arbitrary virtuosity, confusing us or distracting us from his text, in the manner of a poet whose rhyme and metre bear no more than an incidental relation to the sense they serve. Many critics and moviegoers imagine that intrusive alterations of perspective are the “mark” of a film director much as readers once believed that similes and conceits were the mark of a writer. We now understand that good writing can exist quite independent of such conventions—that, in fact, a careless, eclectic use of them results in bad writing. Nichols approaches his visual arrangements like a young writer stuffing incongruous stylisms of Dickens, Joyce, Faulkner, and Hemingway—and some good schtik from Salinger, Mailer, and Bruce Jay Friedman as well—into his prose. In reading, we have a clear view of how disastrously this subverts what reality of his own a writer manages to bring to his material, but we are not so wary of the non-integral perspectives of the motion-picture camera.

Nichols may be somewhat proud of his artful photography, for he has apparently authorized as the film’s advertising emblem a composition that he employs twice, ostentatiously, in the film: Benjamin (in the ad he is decked in ceremonial cap and gown) framed by the bare, curvaceous leg of Mrs. Robinson. Nichols goes in for this sort of camerawork throughout the movie. What’s the point?

“Well, to take this particular issue, the shot of Benjamin through Mrs. R.’s leg as she fiddles with her stockings is intended to fill our field of vision, like Benjamin’s, with brassy sexuality.”

Well, then, why are we looking through the leg at Benjamin, instead of at the leg as if through Benjamin’s eyes?”

“Well, this way we get to see Benjamin reacting as well as what he’s reacting to.”

“Well, why don’t they just show the leg from Benjamin’s shoulder and then right away show us him reacting in a closeup, because we get distracted from him by that leg in the foreground anyway.”

“Well, this way you get the whole idea instantaneously, in a single shot.” Clearly, the argument can continue on both sides, and over each jarring cinematic change: Is this new perspective justified at this moment by what is happening in the movie? Does it work here? Though unusual perspectives are often assumed to be self-justifying, they tend to make us aware of ourselves as an audience—to insist upon the urgency of our being entertained, or else to give us the uneasy feeling that the director is providing insights we aren’t absorbing. Like a child who has been given a great many presents at once, Nichols seems to have just discovered that the camera will do all sorts of remarkable stunts at his bidding. Now he has it crouching low to peer up into a dazzling blur of sunlight. Now staring wide-eyed in to the headlights of oncoming cars so that the beams bounce from the lens, creating floating discs in the night. Now jumping into a swimming pool to catch the swirly patterns of air bubbles in moving water. Now snuggling in a closet corner and ogling out past the hangers, now squinting through a fish tank, now gazing at reflections in a polished tabletop. Now it’s barrelling low along a bumpy highway, now jogging on some unseen shoulder, lending a “documentary” quality by cutting off the tops of people’s heads for cruel, open-pore closeups. Now its lens is foreshortening, now it is wide-angle, now telescopic, now looking to one side so that the main image is way off center. Nichols’ devices keep elbowing us nervously in the ribs, as if without them our attention might stray: anticipated-sound cuts, with dialogue from a new scene beginning while the image of the previous one still lingers on the screen; dizzyingly fast cutting back and forth between Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson when she first offers herself to him, turning her naked body into a blur of flesh; a painful sequence photographed through the distorting glass of a scuba mask; a pullback to a bird’s-eye shot of Benjamin sitting in a deserted Berkeley plaza, which dissolves, to suggest the passage of time, into a shot of Benjamin in precisely the same posture but with the light brighter and the plaza filled with bustling students; a phantasmagoric series of cuts, beginning with the affair proper, that include shots of Benjamin being borne by his raft in the pool and by Mrs. Robinson’s body in bed, Benjamin having breakfast with his parents, then watching TV at home and watching TV in the hotel room.

Nichols’ cameraman, Robert Surtees, has been quoted as saying, “I needed everything I learned in the past thirty years to shoot ‘The Graduate,’ ” as if this were automatically to be taken as testimony to Nichols’ directorial brilliance. Ideally, of course, a director’s style should emerge organically from his over-all conception of the material. A cohesive point of view should lead to a legible plan that relates each shot to the film in its entirety—or, failing that, at least to the surrounding shots, to whole scenes. Nichols, fairly bursting with ambitious ideas, seems to have been squeamish about giving any of them up. His apparent compulsion to retain each distinct evidence of his “creativity” unhooks scenes from one another, and even produces a disjointed quality within individual scenes, as though he intended, instead of a narrative, a series of vignettes. Denied the cabaret option of discretionary blackouts, Nichols is frequently at a loss for some means of proceeding gracefully from one cut to the next. Often, he ducks out of his dilemma with facile irony. He caps a tense family scene at the breakfast table with a cheap guffaw: browned slices pop providentially from a toaster—punctuation of the sort that kept viewers chuckling over the “Dick Van Dyke Show.” When Elaine goes off with Carl at the San Francisco Zoo, Benjamin is left alone in front of the monkey cage. Nichols lingers on the inevitable mugging chimps, granting us also a glimpse of the over-appropriate sign “Do Not Tease.”

How are we to account for these lapses? Once a writer has embarked upon the act of composition, he must put all the fine prose he has read out of his mind, and I suspect that a filmmaker, at some juncture—if not while shooting, then in the cutting room—must do the same with all the movie footage he has viewed admiringly. Nichols seems to assume naïvely that shots that looked good in someone else’s movie will look good in his own. The framing thing, for example, used to be a fad in still photography—we recall the Armistice Day parade viewed through an amputee’s crutch and remaining leg, or the tennis player framed in the netting of his opponent’s racket—but since it failed to tell as much as it promised, its interest soon waned. So it goes with Nichols’ devices. They send us scurrying in search of absent meanings. To complicate matters, we recognize certain types of shots from other films, and tend to associate them with certain directors—to consider them, in fact, the substance of a particular director’s style. And a number of Nichols’ imitative shots are so strikingly reminiscent of their originals that they compound our distraction by calling us back into a previous film experience. The huge, beauty-parlored faces frozen in artificial hilarities which so impinge upon Benjamin’s fragile homecoming sensibilities dance before the camera just like party faces from “8 1/2” or “Juliet of the Spirits.” Fellini’s camera catches more of the truth about those who impose their presences upon the distraught Mastroianni: they are terrible harpies, but, even so, something is to be learned, not merely endured, from observing them. The startling zoom-back shot of Mrs. Robinson leaning rain-drenched against a blank wall—an image so drained of color as to appear virtually black-and-white—evokes a shot from Antonioni’s “La Notte.” Its main effect here, however, is unintended. It strikes us with the depths of Anne Bancroft’s sudden ugliness, and the image is affecting not because of what has befallen an unsavory character but because the spectacle of an unsparingly photographed woman star has an overwhelming poignance. In the face of Miss Bancroft’s professional courage, we are ashamed to have doubted the honesty of the enterprise for which she abases herself. Again the mind has been drawn in an undesirable direction. Astonishingly, Nichols seems to miss the point at times. Much of the business involved in Benjamin’s wait for Mrs. Robinson in the hotel room recalls a similar scene in Truffaut’s “The Soft Skin.” Here the effect of Benjamin’s flicking the trysting-room lights on and off is largely dissipated because the camera is so close in on him; we get little sense of Benjamin in the whole room as it flips between light and darkness.

When critics speak at all of this sort of directorial borrowing, they tend to talk, with absurd politeness, about “influence.” Thus, in his review of “The Graduate” Stanley Kauffmann writes, “In ‘Virginia Woolf’ I thought I saw some influence of Kurosawa; I think so again here,” or speaks of a “Godardian irony through objects.” (Irony is irony; Kauffmann means to draw our attention to specific methods that Godard has fathered—lingering on props to comment upon the action, or juxtaposing shots of characters with shots of things that supposedly illuminate character.) Again, in noticing the “aged, uncomprehending passengers” who turn to stare at Benjamin and Elaine on the bus, he writes, “One last reminder!—of Lester’s old-folks chorus in ‘The Knack.’ ” This critical approach implies that a director somehow absorbs the craft of his mentors, which gives his work additional resonance. But a conscious artist is rarely influenced in any such abstruse way. Nearly every great director, writer, composer, or painter plagiarizes his forebears’ craft—especially early in his career, before he has fully worked out his own thing. He learns, as Archibald MacLeish has put it, “the way a boy learns from an apple orchard—by stealing what he has a taste for and can carry off.” To speak of this imitation as “influence” falsely implies unawareness. Obviously, Nichols isn’t trying to sneak anything past us; he has sufficient ingenuity to disguise his borrowings better, if he cared to.

Nichols (and Webb before him) clearly aimed at that comedy which arises naturally out of a scrupulous observation of life—that vision of human frustration and inadequacy which is devastatingly true yet devoutly compassionate. This is probably the highest form of comedy and, at its most successful, the funniest. It is the comedy of Chekhov, of some Mark Twain stories and some of Chaplin’s movies, of Lenny Bruce, of Salinger—the wise laughter rising above apparent tragedy. Now, there can also be a certain condemnation in such laughter, but never so much as to overwhelm charity with contempt. The song that Simon and Garfunkel do on the sound track after Benjamin flees from Mrs. Robinson’s cops suggests its temper: “And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson, Jesus loves you more than you will know.” Great comedy is naturally subversive, by virtue of its accuracy, but it is never venomous. It may give exquisite pleasure over long periods without making us laugh out loud. Then, when the side-splitters do come, they have a quality almost of spiritual purgation. Nichols would have liked, one imagines, to make “The Graduate” this sort of comedy, but he was trained in a theatre—cabaret and Broadway—where comedy’s success is meter-measured: How many in the audience laugh? How often and how loud? Nichols seems to care about getting the laughs, even easy ones; he doesn’t particularly care who it is he’s laughing at, and he apparently believes that a laugh is as good a way out of an artistic problem as any other.

An odd change occurs in Nichols’ point of view at the beginning of the middle section of the film (when Benjamin telephones Mrs. Robinson) and persists until the end of that section (when Benjamin realizes he loves Elaine): Benjamin himself becomes the butt of the jokes. In the first part of the film, adults seemed laughable, or pitiable, yet basically well intentioned. Here they seem wicked (Mrs. Robinson) or dangerously insensitive (Benjamin’s parents). Having become sinister, the grownups no longer seem fit objects for comedy. Nonetheless, this middle section of “The Graduate” is the most comically intended of the three, and, to judge by the reactions of the audience, it is the most comically successful. Benjamin turns into a victim here—not only a victim of Mrs. Robinson’s wiles but a victim of his own ineptitude. It is the second victim, in particular, that we are meant to laugh at. Nichols has filled the section with the sort of broad funny business he polished in staging Neil Simon’s comedies on Broadway. Benjamin should be uncomfortable with Mrs. Robinson partly because of his naïveté but more because he understands that she can have no real place in the scheme of his life. Nichols, however, exaggerates the naïveté until it becomes farcical. About fifteen minutes of running time elapses, for example, between the time Benjamin telephones Mrs. Robinson and the time they hit the hotel bed together—fifteen minutes of sight and sound gags on the theme of nervousness. Benjamin fumbles through the arrangements for their rendezvous—nodding maniacally, scratching, wheezing from deep in his throat, like a frightened animal—as though he expected a vice squad to descend on him at any instant. In some business with the room clerk that centers on his having no luggage, Benjamin loses his cool completely. The single, frenetic joke—the ninny doesn’t know what he’s doing—continues after Mrs. Robinson gets up to the bedroom: Benjamin kisses her just after she has inhaled smoke from a cigarette, so she must hold the smoke in until the kiss is over; Benjamin tries to bring her a wooden hanger for her dress, but it’s attached to the closet rod; and so forth. We quickly exhaust our ways of receiving the joke, and our laughter becomes similarly frenetic.

Critics have remarked that the excruciating exchanges between Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson are reminiscent of some of the bits that Nichols used to do with Elaine May. Their work together often portrayed men and women coming on with each other, and Nichols and May were particularly sharp at skewering common dishonesties, egotistical little games, and ulterior desperation. Yet the one scene in “The Graduate” in which Benjamin lets his hair down to Elaine (“I feel like I’m playing this game somebody else made up the rules to . . .”) is closer to a Nichols and May routine than any conversation with Mrs. Robinson—though heaven forbid we should laugh at it. Their comedy almost never took sides—one of them didn’t become the other’s butt. Nichols’ character was just as derisible as May’s, and neither used gag lines to make us laugh; instead, each tried to express himself with the utmost seriousness and wound up—partly to our embarrassment, because each said things that any of us might hear ourselves saying—fatuous. In “The Graduate,” Nichols treats as revelation the kind of material he would once have used for his comedy, and makes comedy out of the kind of material that would once have been beneath him. When Benjamin first arrives at the hotel, he does a double take when the clerk asks him, “Are you here for an affair?” Soon we are asked to laugh at every hint of his anguish. Mrs. Robinson becomes more than a domineering female. The traditional sexual roles are reversed: she clearly wants nothing more than a good time in bed, and Benjamin, like a Vassar girl, keeps working the conversation around to his misgivings about not having a “meaningful relationship.” Her frank, predatory sexuality begins to look like derision of Benjamin. His compliance begins to suggest that he must despise himself. Had Nichols made a more substantial case against Benjamin’s surroundings—had that issue survived the first third of the film—his self-degradation would have made sense, at least dramatically: he might have felt so sullied by his inability to break connections with society that he could not foresee ever feeling pride in himself.

After the surprising credibility of the first third, the tight structure of plot and character begin falling to pieces. We are assaulted by a series of unbelievable details. Presumably vital questions of plot become irrelevant, because of incredible elements within the plot. Is Benjamin a virgin or isn’t he? After the first hotel-room scene with Mrs. Robinson, we could equally well decide either way. Since Benjamin’s entire motivation in the scene hinges upon the “true” answer, we may assume that Nichols at least whispered it in Dustin Hoffman’s ear, and, without very much extra effort, could have tipped off the audience. If Benjamin is a virgin, we may chalk up most of his terrible distress to first-time jitters. (Many of the critics made exactly this assumption, and consequently took Benjamin’s sexual initiation, or “coming of age,” to be the major theme of the film.) If he is not, we must look for more interesting and disturbing causes. Having read the book, as John Lennon says, I can report that although the Benjamin of the film usually acts as though he’d never even seen Playboy , the Benjamin of the novel is not a virgin. Ten pages are devoted to his departure for and return from three weeks on the road, undertaken, after graduation, to relieve his metaphysical distress, and he informs his father afterward, “There were a few whores included in the tour.” Nor is there any indication that they were Benjamin’s first. Just as Nichols has declined to let us know about Benjamin’s previous sexual experience, he has left out the trip altogether, even though many of its incidents might have had tremendous cinematic potential. Benjamin tells his father of fighting a forest fire in Shasta country, of hitching rides from common folk, of sex in “a cow pasture, Dad,” going on to say of this, “It was about three in the morning and there was ice in the grass and cows walking around us.” And he asks, rhetorically, “Have you ever had a queer Indian approach you while you’re trying to keep your clothes from burning up?” The stuff a Dylan song is made of! Yet Nichols omits the whole diminished Bildungsroman , possibly because it so forcefully underscores the proper problem of “The Graduate;” it shows beyond doubt that Benjamin is desperately in earnest about trying to determine what sort of life he wants to construct for himself. By concealing Benjamin’s sexual experience from us, Nichols is able to get mileage out of the boy’s naïveté and ineptitude. We could not laugh in quite the same way if we knew that Benjamin had just returned from sleeping with prostitutes on the road; we would have to treat him more seriously. We would have to interpret his reluctance to embark upon an affair with Mrs. Robinson as more sensible and telling.

The virginity question is just one example of what happens as “The Graduate” veers from its early course. As soon as Nichols starts fudging on his material, he gets caught up in a web of implausibilities. First, we have the B.M.O.C. Benjamin—evidently head of the debating club, campus editor, captain of the cross-country team, social chairman of his house—transformed into a somnambulistic, clowny schlepp, and, again, into an aggressive tiger. It’s natural for a guy to manifest different aspects of his personality with different girls, but the “cool” Benjamin, in shades, who knows his way around tough Sunset Strip burlesque joints simply cannot be the shook-up fellow with the big-eyed stare who assures Mrs. Robinson as he prepares to grant her fondest wish, “I want you to know how much I appreciate this.” Next, Mrs. Robinson—a handsome, worldly, unhappily married woman—is transformed first into a businesslike mistress and then in to a hellhound. Nichols seems on the verge of making her human in the fight after Benjamin pleads, of their affair, “Couldn’t we liven this up with a little conversation?” For a moment, he allows us to realize that the young man has the position of strength in a liaison of this kind, and that the older woman—worn out, fearful about wrinkles and flab and her waning capacity for arousing desire or affection—is the one who is truly vulnerable. Just as we begin to feel some sympathy for this wretched woman, Nichols snaps the witch mask back on her. The remarkable thing is that there is not the slightest necessity for either of these sequences of transformation. Nothing essential to the story requires that Benjamin ever be less than bright and competent. Nor does anything demand Mrs. Robinson’s consummate villainy; the wooing of a girl after an affair with her mother would by itself present a hero with plenty of obstacles—especially once the father-husband found out. So Nichols has introduced these two distortions of personality as though to help captivate us away from our initial focus, and from them spring a litter of false bits. Benjamin would not continue to call Mrs. Robinson by her surname after they have been sleeping together for weeks. He would not make such an idiot of himself over retrieving his toothbrush from his car. He would not drive his car literally off the road at Elaine’s casual mention of the hotel where he and Mrs. Robinson have been trysting. Mrs. Robinson would not be so insanely touchy on the subject of her daughter. She would not perpetually address Benjamin in that excessively clear tone one reserves for small children. She would not lean over indifferently to rub out a smudge on her slip when Benjamin puts a hand on her brassiered breast—her hungers could not be so cold. She would not be so ready to tell Elaine of the affair, nor would Benjamin—they would not race each other home to break the news. She would not then invent a preposterous story about Benjamin’s getting her drunk and raping her—stab him in the back and then try to hang him on a concealed-weapons rap—and if she did, neither her daughter nor her husband would believe her, because they could not live twenty years with such a woman and know nothing of her treachery. Indeed, Mrs. Robinson becomes so impossible that her machinations have to take place offscreen for almost the last hour of the movie, except for a two-minute confrontation with Benjamin when he appears searching for Elaine, and a one-line appearance in the wedding finale. With Mrs. Robinson out of the way, Elaine must share the burden of uncertain characterization. She falls for the rape story completely and dismisses Benjamin for good, then immediately believes his denial and falls in love with him. We might make allowances for that much, but suddenly she becomes inexplicably flighty; her feelings seem to be serving some unfathomable higher demands—the director’s, we cannot help suspecting. Precisely when the course of the film hinges upon her response to Benjamin, she grows so wildly fickle that even the conventions of “femininity” will not excuse her. For no apparent reason, she shatters our picture of the obstacles arising from a misguided adult world.

Much of the excitement surrounding “The Graduate” has stemmed from the proposition that, in Glamour’s words, it “gets to the very heart of what youth is about,” and is also a superbly “adult” movie. (Very few children’s movies come out of Hollywood anymore, but producers still reserve the term “adult” for films they regard as uncommonly truthful.) Critics who previously had only scorn for film renderings of Youth hail “The Graduate” as the first American motion picture to deal authentically with today’s much discussed generation gap. Yet in representing the gap between contemporary adults and youth the film unwittingly calls urgent attention to the gap between the America of today and the America of ten years ago, from which its generational vision might more credibly have emerged.

“The Graduate” hinges upon Benjamin’s interestingness , and it is an interestingness not so much portrayed as established by a tautological convention: People who don’t say much and who look pained in frequent closeups are deep and interesting because why else would they be pictured that way? Carl Smith is introduced and limned to underscore our impression of Benjamin. Carl is the Lane Coutell figure—tweedy, suave, “giving the impression of having at least three lighted cigarettes in each hand.” His fraternity brothers, naturally, refer to him as “the make-out king.” But what, after all, does the contrast between Carl and Benjamin amount to? I asked a number of people who saw the movie. Most of them, in fascinating departures from the text, immediately replied that the two were as different as Jacob and Esau, and went on to paint subjective portraits of Carl as an unfeeling square and Benjamin as a sort of radical-hippie—a logical extension of his “interestingness.” But an interesting young man of the late fifties transplanted into the America of 1968 would be barely conscious. Ten years ago, a primitive rejection of adult emptiness and hypocrisy was a sufficient condition for interestingness. Today, by itself, it isn’t nearly enough. It may not even be necessary.

On the basis of all we can learn directly from the film, the differences between Carl and Benjamin are these: Benjamin is the sloppier dresser, the more awkward, the more sour, the more confused, and—almost logically—the more interesting. But isn’t he, really, awfully straight arrow? Poor Carl, like the President, is condemned for his idiom. (He proposes to Elaine by saying, “I think we’d make a pretty good team.”) He sees the course of his life stretching clearly ahead of him and prepares to traverse it without ambivalence, confident in the relevance of his past (primarily, we assume, his studies) to his business in the world. He carries himself in a way that suggests he envisions not so much a future as a beneficent destiny. Benjamin, on the contrary, lacks the pleasant conviction of progress. By common definitions, he has already proved he can succeed, but he is unable to gain any satisfaction from that excellence. He finds himself unexpectedly disenchanted with award-winning and aunt-kissing, and he regards his education as useless, but nothing that looks like an option has presented itself to him. Webb’s novel continually emphasizes these points:

“ . . . I’m finished with schools, Dad.” A section of grapefruit fell off his spoon and onto the table. “I never want to see another school again. I never want to see another educated person again in my life.” “Come on, Ben.” “Come on!” Benjamin said, standing up. “Now I have wasted twenty-one years of my life. As of yesterday. And that is a hell of a lot to waste.” “Sit down.” “Dad,” Benjamin said, “for twenty-one years I have been shuffling back and forth between classrooms and libraries. Now you tell me what the hell it’s got me.” “A damn fine education.” “Are you kidding me?” “No.” “You call me educated?” “I do.” “Well, I don’t,” Benjamin said, sitting down again. “Because if that’s what it means to be educated then the hell with it.” “Ben?” his mother said. “What are you talking about.” “I am trying to tell you,” Benjamin said, “I’m trying to tell you that I am through with all this.” “All what.” “All this!” he said, holding his arms out beside him. “I don’t know what it is but I’m sick of it. I want something else.” “What do you want.” “I don’t know.”

Now, for a man to be twenty-one years old in America today, for a man to have grown up around Los Angeles and have been through four years at the nerve center of an Eastern college, and for him suddenly to wrestle with dissatisfactions so unfamiliar to him that their articulation is as primitive as this—and it is more primitive in the movie—can only be a sign of some serious retardation. Such a man is “interesting” only insofar as we might marvel at how soundly he has slept through the life that was going on around him, at how thoroughly he has managed to avoid exposure to a dozen explanations for his malaise. Yet the movies importance rests upon our assumption that Benjamin represents the best, the vanguard, of his generation. Nichols cannot be permitted the line of defense divined by those polls that are forever showing comfortable majorities of students supporting the war, abhorring drugs, and so forth—polls that never point out that at Harvard, for example, six per cent of the students support the war, a quarter have indicated they will go into exile or prison rather than submit to the draft, and fewer than half have never turned on. Benjamin is not supposed to be a “typical” collegian. (He doesn’t wear a “ state ” sweater.) He is supposed to be pointing toward the future—showing us which way the wind is blowing. Even in the late fifties, any harbinger would have had much clearer ideas about what he was rejecting. (There were beatniks then, after all, issuing position papers on American society.) The true Benjamin of Eisenhower America would have spoken to his father more in this vein: “Dad, you’re worried about my ‘negative attitude.’ But I can’t see keeping on with the scramble anymore. Don’t take this personally, but you and your friends look dead to me. The system is a trap, huh? It whooshes you along in frantic, meaningless patterns—college, mixers, grad school. And then the whole Good Life in America syndrome—career, tony wife, kids in good schools, Martinis, intelligent friends, two-week vacations, Newsweek . . . No adventure, no honesty, no break through. Well, I see how impoverished my ambitions have been so far.” Vanguard youth went on like that in the fifties; they accepted the seriousness of their parents’ beliefs and life styles, and could therefore address themselves to adult society in the manner of prosecuting attorneys. In the sixties, a paradigmatic father-and-son conversation would begin just where Webb’s conversation ends:

“What do you want.” “I don’t know.”

And that would probably be the whole of the conversation, because one or both of them would then get up and leave the room, weary of preaching to the wind, racked (or delighted) by the impossibility of saving the other, no longer caring. When the Benjamin of the fifties finally said “I don’t know,” he had run out of ways to explain himself but he still believed in the possibility of explanation, if he were but a little more articulate, his parents a little more sensitive. The Benjamin of today would say “I don’t know” right at the start because he wouldn’t consider explanation pertinent, or even feasible. The very language given him by the adult world, he would feel, leads perniciously, inexorably back into that world. “So you’ve got no respect! ” a father accuses, and as soon as the son tries to redefine the word his case is lost. Instead of the old heated philosophical debates, almost grown children now simply attempt to humor or manipulate their parents—ideally, creating the impression that they are allowing themselves to be manipulated. Indeed, many young people have made this faculty a criterion of being grown: When you finally understand where it’s at, you abandon fruitless argument.

Twenty-year-olds today can dismiss their parents’ vision without a lot of agonizing partly because they have the sense of being into much that their parents can’t even know about. Some adults continue to maintain that Blind Youth always suffers from this delusion: “You’ll look back in ten years and realize how right I was.” But those who have paid closer attention to their children perhaps have felt more deeply put down than any generation of parents in history. For the first time, parents have taken to heart the feedback they got from their kids, have come to suspect they may be leading pointless lives and have thereby been rendered unable to take pride in what they have achieved. Properly, the Braddocks display no such defensive doubts in relation to their son: Benjamin cannot even begin to formulate precisely what it is that’s wrong. More critically, his “rebellion” seems to arise, unprompted, from a tabula rasa of experience; he sees into less , not more, than his parents, and he has little appreciation of their needs and binds. He is unable to lie to them, let alone manipulate them. He gives the impression of having investigated little and “been through” even less. Has Benjamin already checked out psychedelics, heavy sex, solitude, S.D.S., mysticism, and so on? Unaccountably, a number of people I spoke with guessed that he had, even though there is no evidence for it in the film, nor does anything in his personality, as it comes across on the screen, give the “feel” of such experience. Eisenhower America: In the late fifties, a young man could leap directly from a normal middle-class scene into this paralyzing condition of being altogether lost The culture had not prepared him for the violence of his disillusionment, nor had it offered him a series of seductive alternate routes. “The Graduate” is largely the work of people who experienced some version of this dilemma a decade ago. They’ve now apparently decided that America is ready to be told—told not that her very best youth despairs for her but that some eccentric few are having unspecified “misgivings.”

The people at Embassy Pictures suggested that I might like to accompany Dustin Hoffman on trips around Long Island and to Washington, D.C., where he was to address “bodies of educators” on the subject of Youth Today. I thanked them and declined. The movies co-opt our intelligences; remarkably, we look to them for truths that stalk us every day. Mr. Hoffman, who has received a quarter of a million dollars for his second movie, is over thirty and has been a professional actor for a dozen years. He has been quoted as saying that Benjamin is like an exaggeration of himself ten years ago, and although he has made the part eminently “his own”—the charming gestures, mannerisms, and postures of this kid in the movie surely reflect as much Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock—one still gets the feeling that a youthful-looking thirty-year-old is playing an ironic memory of himself at twenty-one. I asked a man at Embassy Pictures what, besides a movie role, qualified Hoffman as an expert on Youth Today. “A lot of the young people are turning to him,” the man replied.

“The Graduate” appears to be a most “liberal” film. It sympathizes with Benjamin’s disgust at adult things; it seem, to condone some fairly taboo sexual behavior; it makes one feel “good” about this younger generation everyone has been fretting about. In fact, it is a kind of propaganda of desperation. Sophisticated movie audiences fall prey to its snow jobs no less than unsophisticated ones. The latter don’t yearn for “honesty” and so don’t search for traces of it; the former react too hungrily when traces reveal themselves. “The Graduate” concedes that upper-middle-class life is not as golden as Hollywood once cracked it up to be, and even so slight an admission leaves moviegoers breathless with surprise and gratitude. Mike Nichols has claimed as a theme “the Los Angelesization of the world . . . in which things take over a person’s life.” Yet shortly after he suggests this theme, he begins, as if he had quickly discovered that it wasn’t all that compelling, to shrug it off.

In admitting the Eisenhower secret, “The Graduate” obfuscates the truth about Johnson America, which is that hardly any of its most interesting young men look forward to “making it” in our present society. Popular art has helped us sustain a preposterous myth about how it feels to grow up in this country. A young man who tries to reject the cant and depersonalization that threaten to drain him is generally—as he appears to us in films, television, and magazine articles—a problem-ridden case. He may, of course, engage our sympathy with his basic goodness, his sensitivity, or his personal charm, but the central point about him remains his maladjustment—he needs “straightening out.” We still seem willing to believe that adjustment is the proper object of growth—that the closer one comes to “being adjusted,” the more mature one is. Naturally, the definition acts as a defense for all that is most repressive in society. When the protagonist of a film is a murderous young hoodlum, for example, the deep social problems he may represent become subordinate to the film’s theme—society’s inexorable crusade to get hold of the kid and “rehabilitate” him, or, at least, eliminate him from the scene by imprisoning or killing him.

Moviegoers are desperately starved for cinematic truth about what it is like to live in America at this moment in history. Twenty years ago, Robert Warshow wrote a piece about gangster movies in which he talked of maintaining public morale as the principal responsibility of mass culture: “At a time when the normal condition of the citizen is a state of anxiety, euphoria spreads over our culture like the broad smile of an idiot.” The anxiety of the populace has by now grown so acute that even responsible statesmen have voiced warnings of an internal crisis to match the Civil War or the Great Depression—a kind of national nervous breakdown. And by now the organs of mass culture—especially the movies—have been forced to develop more sophisticated techniques of allaying, or disguising, our trauma. The whole idea of maladjustment, for one, has become a nice vehicle for dealing with confused or unhappy protagonists. (Movies are not, of course, the only contemporary art that uses “dealing with” to mean “getting rid of the problem of.”) In this period, when the “sensitive” individual is supposed to feel so profoundly helpless to alter horrible trends, American movies are insisting more strongly than ever upon the power of a single fine person to transform an entire bad scene. Two of the most successful films of the past year—“To Sir, with Love” and “Up the Down Staircase”—left us with this optimistic moral. People dimly sensed that “Bonnie and Clyde” suggests more about our present lives than most pictures with contemporary settings do. They talked on about our sense of ambient violence, and so forth (several Village Voice readers who responded to a Ten Best Movies poll pencilled “Why are we in Vietnam?” next to their votes for “Bonnie and Clyde”), but its relevance perhaps has more to do with the doom that stalks its two central characters relentlessly from the beginning. Both are beings with no possibility of anything but drab, impoverished lives The thematic force of the movie lies in our understanding that their fate is never substantially altered; they are simply doomed to a more precipitate and compelling bad end. We are protected from the metaphor of their hopeless lives by distance and by disguise. They lived in a bad place during a bad time. And gangsters can’t make it. We have not yet made our move. We are still lying low, figuring the angles, plotting our breakthrough. Yet we suspect that our distinction between legal and criminal is a quibble, that any shortcut toward making it will be seen as an aggression: you cannot bust magnificently out of the game. “Bonnie and Clyde” seems to argue, with Bob Dylan, that we live “Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden . . . Where black is the color, where none is the number,” where kamikaze assault is the only alternative to diminished existence. Despite the largely fixed, nearly classic dramatic patterns of “Bonnie and Clyde,” its hard authenticities draw us close to the transgressor-victims, and lay claim to our feelings of desperation and inescapable failure.

“The Graduate” also progresses through the traditional patterns of a classic genre—the initiation story with romantic triangle—and also goes further than previous films of its genre toward making “alienation” understandable. But movies like “The Graduate,” however much they “criticize” society, must ultimately affirm the possibility of Individual liberation. The tragic conception of American life has found expression in films that are—almost without exception—about criminals. We have had a tradition of “serious” movies, too, which have shown that success isn’t that easy—have seemed to cry out against a too cheerful Americanism. Yet even the suffering, failure, and deaths in these movies have led us toward an irresistible, transcendent optimism; since they make concessions to a bleak conception of our lives along the way, they give us fewer grounds for finally rejecting their overriding vision. Still, American directors cannot be said to have done their affirming in bad faith. If the sailor’s girl in “The Best Years of Our Lives” had found that she could not, after all, spend her life with a man who had hooks instead of hands, and if Brando in “On the Waterfront” had been thrown unconscious into the river after being beaten by Lee J. Cobb’s thugs Instead of rising to lead the magically rebellious longshoremen back to work, neither movie would have been satisfying emotionally— or artistically. Movies have created for themselves a peremptory demand—that criminals never succeed or good Americans fail. If twenty adults had laid hands on Benjamin in the church and held him for the paddy wagon while Elaine drove off with Carl for their honeymoon (as would probably have happened in life), we would leave the theatre feeling cheated and lied to. The thoughtful moment on the bus, the absence of a clinch at the curtain—this is the maximum pessimism we can bear, though I noticed that most of the audience, anticipating the extent of Nichols’ seriousness, got up to leave the theatre as soon as Benjamin and Elaine climb aboard the bus. Should the “optimism” of the ending be undercut by what we have already glimpsed of society? Benjamin’s slipping away without ever adequately defining his relation to it makes the question unanswerable. From time to time, Nichols breaks out of the affirmative mood, but he is forever reintegrating his material into protective conventions: misunderstood youth, love conquering obstacles, vigor and persistence rewarded.

Since it is so hard to end an American movie with the defeat of a good man, directors inform their work with seriousness by being “negative” along the way—by acknowledging that problems do exist. Some war veterans face difficulties of readjustment; some union leaders exploit and intimidate workers; some parents threaten the happiness of their children. Mindless optimism having become nearly a convention of the American cinema, a little pessimism—even if it is no better thought through, and therefore no truer, than the buoyant vision it is meant to supplant—goes a long way in advancing the director’s reputation. The more negative his vision appears to be, short of causing him to neglect his civic duty—the closer he can “cut it”—the more likely an educated audience is to call him a genius. Because American films straggle so far behind literature and European films in reflecting the actual quality of modern life, rudimentary negativism can easily be taken for truthfulness, and a decade-old vision can appear to be “ahead of its time.”

To the extent that we learn about the life around us through art, we are often learning what life was like ten or more years ago. The literature of generation gap that has abounded in the last year or so, particularly on and off Broadway, has been conceived either from an adult point of view, which implicitly regards the generation gap as a comfortably perennial problem, or, in the more significant instances, from youth’s point of view—at least, as well as it can be recollected—which vaguely senses an unprecedentedly wide breach. Since the authors of these pieces are now, at the youngest, pushing thirty, the general public has only lately become conscious of a species of generation gap—dolled up with a contemporary vocabulary and milieu—that existed in the fifties, when cool Berkeley coeds could get engaged to guys like Carl, and vague mutterings of discontent still had a radical ring.

One of “The Graduate”’s falsehoods in the light of contemporary experience arises from the supposed “strangeness” of Benjamin’s condition. Isolating him so (isolating him by his vision of things, for in his outward aspect he is the perfect teacher’s pet) seems meant to frighten potential malcontents into adjustment. In life, of course, Benjamin would have met hundreds of his peers—heads, revolutionaries, and some who would not fall so easily into categories—who shared his sense of America’s disorder, and he would have already begun to work with them on new conceptions of community, and of sanity. At the very least, he would have had a friend who felt as he did. Likewise, if he were a real boy returning home, none of the people around him would be totally surprised at his behavior; they would quickly understand him in terms of what they had already learned of alienated youth. “Thinking of dropping out, Benjamin?” his father would ask, with a nervous chuckle, as he passed his son in the pool for the sixteenth straight afternoon. “Benjamin’s starting to act like a hippie or something,” Mrs. Braddock would complain. Their friends and neighbors might still clutch at him, but it would be because here he was, practically the only great kid around not yet acting all crazy about his future and the lives of his elders. And then, when Benjamin started to exhibit his malaise more openly, or when they caught on to his new feelings, they might not understand the whole thing but they would recognize the symptoms. And not of some rare disease but of an epidemic. A friend might come over and say, “Braddock, my kid in law school wrote me the same kind of nutty stuff last week, and my fifteen-year-old daughter is threatening to run away to some damn commune in Big Sur. What the hell is going on, Braddock?”

Responsive parents have come to realize that something more momentous than the perennial rift between children and the adult world is now in the air. The rebellious youth of the fifties—of which Benjamin may be considered a not particularly precocious example—rejected a number of life styles within the system but never deeply questioned the necessity of the system itself. Like Benjamin, they didn’t know what they wanted to do—only that they didn’t want to punch a clock, or spend Saturday afternoon with a beer and a ball game. Yet even their negations orbited in one or another epicycle of the adults’ neat Ptolemaic system. They believed in intelligent compromise Whereas Eisenhower youths were forever finding poignant contradictions in the lives of their parents, Johnson youths have found mostly irrelevance. Eisenhower youths tried to reëducate their families, sometimes at a traumatic cost—to get them to understand . Johnson youths, in the realization that only those who have ears to hear will hear, have tried to minimize hassle. Young people no longer simply inherit attitudes; many of them have tuned in to the outside world. Parents are hard pressed to believe that, beyond an early age, they no longer play terribly important roles in their children’s psychic lives. Permissiveness, far from being responsible for youth’s new attitudes, may be the most genuine and most fitting response to them. It takes seriously the feeling that significant points of alignment have vanished. For a time, parents appeal to all sorts of motives that they feel must reside within their kid—his desire, for example, to live up to their expectations, to “make something of himself.” But these motives derive from their vision of the world, and reside, ipso facto , only within that vision. Permissiveness, when it is practiced, testifies to the uselessness of traditional devices. The kid is not rebelling; he hasn’t oriented himself in relation to his parents’ lives at all. Therefore, nothing they can say or do will bring him into line.

Benjamin’s malaise is so impossibly vague, then, that the Braddock family’s generation gap can be no more than a convention. What meaning it has arises not from anything that Benjamin says or does but from the artful observation that Nichols lavishes upon the moral ugliness of an environment. His fidelity of observation, however, awakens our appetite for further honesties. Because he has given us the visual reality, we expect some measure of reality beneath the surface. If the whole suburban scene had been pictured by the usual Hollywood camera—if it had been a Saturday Evening Post suburb, or the Anderson suburb of television’s “Father Knows Best”—then it would never have occurred to us that the “problem” of the movie might be larger than Benjamin’s problem of adjustment. His “identity crisis” would have seemed to have nothing to do with the times; he would have been merely a talented young man who must, upon graduation, abandon his fantasy of limitless possibilities—who must realize that he could not be a lawyer and a scientist and an artist all at once. His paralysis would have suggested a young adult’s agony of decision over what he must give up. But the perspectives of Nichols’ camera are so slanted toward Benjamin’s vision as to warrant his malaise. If things look generally good to us, Benjamin’s course of resolution is clear: he just has to work things out (in his own head) and get on with it. This is the perspective we would expect from his parents. If things look bad to us, however, the entire message of the film is transformed: Benjamin’s problem is objective and terrible, the course of its resolution not at all apparent. If things look bad, it means that Benjamin is the only person in the movie who has any idea what is happening; everybody else’s life is delusion. His anomie becomes reasonable, and his “brilliant future” an empty concept. If Nichols had only carried this insight through to its conclusion, it would scarcely matter that Benjamin is not haunted, as so many of his peers are, by the war, the blacks, the poor—mysteriously, not even by the draft. We would need no apocalyptic consciousness from him, no sense of a culture unravelling. Born to the “best” that American society can offer, Benjamin could represent—simply by his decent, tormented stolidity—something of the difficulty of living in America at this time. Benjamin is at loose ends. Perhaps he is not strong enough to forge a new life style. But he will never pursue his parents’ kind of life, or, if he does, he will never be free from inner agitation. Our understanding should not be that next week he will settle on law school or the Peace Corps and everything will be right. His ends must be looser, and deeper, than that.

Dropping out is not so much an activity as a sensibility. One directly engages the relevant, but one cannot rebel against an irrelevance; one drops out of it. Underground propaganda has made us think of dropping out as a rather bold, active stroke. It is more often a paralyzed sabbatical that spontaneously interrupts an “upward climb” with doubts so urgent as to short-circuit away all energy. Abulia, a total failure of alternatives that makes all courses of “positive action” appear equal evasions, is attacking not simply the crazies who spring to mind at the label “dropout” but alarming proportions of our most splendid young men. We have come to think of them with a certain shame, partly because their example seems to express too much disapproval of America but more because their failure of direction, their shiftless gloom or joy, itself seems somehow un-American. The media, whose understanding of alienation is rooted in the fifties, have used “dropping out” to describe something that hippies do—something exploratory, and, in that sense, temporary, traditional, and safe. Even comparatively young writers speak anachronistically of things like “hippies’ condemnation of middle-class society.” Beatniks condemned things, defined themselves as opposite to “the square world,” and derived their meaning from acts of flouting. Dropping out, in whatever costume, happens inside one’s head and may be, to an important degree, irrevocable. And what else is all Benjamin’s “drifting” about?

A few transformative years witnessed—not fortuitously—dramatic shifts in the administration of government (from Eisenhower to Kennedy and then to Johnson), a new consciousness of domestic deprivation, the beginnings of racial militancy, a new obsession with international morality, and the advent of psychedelic substances and the intense eclectic spiritualism that grew up around them. The direction of American youth during the past decade has been bound to politics and to drugs as the sub-generations got shot at in Mississippi, organized for student power and for the grape strikers at Berkeley, and grooved to the Airplane at the Avalon Ballroom on a thousand Owsley micrograms. During the four and a half years between the Kennedy assassinations, unprecedented numbers of young people awakened to the proportions of America’s imperfection. Those to whom John Kennedy held out a promise had graduated when the Johnson mandate began to sour. But the postwar babies didn’t feel betrayed. They had never known the promise—the strong pride in America. They doubted if it was ever more than a dream. Many of them grew up hard and cynical, or simply aloof from the abyss of American problems. Though drugs form the actual focus only of the hippie scene, they have become an integral part of the daily environment in almost every sphere that young people influence. Yet if one of Nichols’ Berkeley extras had lit up a joint in the background, the effect would be shocking; it would suddenly place Benjamin in a different time setting altogether.

In one sense, Nichols cannot be faulted for choosing to ignore protest and pot and the evangelism of individual and communitarian consciousness—any more than for not allowing a single black to pass more than fleetingly before his camera and for not mentioning the war in Vietnam. Yet in another sense what Nichols is talking about is precisely these things, for which the suburban void is no metaphor at all. He has not simply denied attention to drugs or politics; he has created a world in which they play no part, a world still obsessed with that old hangup sex. “The Graduate” has to do with an outstanding young man who finds himself turned off by the society he has been preparing to ensconce himself in. Yet all the readily available images to justify a turn-off far more compelling than Benjamin’s have been declined. Nichols has depicted Benjamin’s milieu as dishearteningly barren, but beyond showing its implicit conspiracy against everything that is seemly in his protagonist he has not begun to hint at why its barrenness may now be dangerous. When Benjamin’s landlord accuses him of being an outside agitator, the slight jest at the expense of right-wing Californians fails to draw any resonance from life; there is, for example, no trace of the compulsive political and cultural polarizations in that state, or of Berkeley’s significance as a New Left citadel, or of our myth that agitation, in the universities or the ghettos, wings in from “outside.” Nichols has made a film about growing up that is really about growing down, the lowering of consciousness; a film about dropping out that is really about working in; a film about alienated youth that refuse to acknowledge the momentous sources of alienation. “The Graduate” treats the question of alienation with an easy familiarity. It makes alienation seem to spring from unreasonable idealism, from overreaction to the harmless vulgarity of plenty. A disaffection more extreme than Benjamin’s—more in line with the disaffection of his actual generation—would have seemed disproportionate to the innocuous “evils” that Nichols has depicted.

We have grown quick to regard citizens exhibiting signs of disaffection as neurotic, delinquent, or “confused”—as members of a vaguely inferior minority whose discontent rests largely upon the fictions of disturbed imaginations. The President of the United States, in his State of the Union Message, makes get-tough asides about draft-card burners, marijuana smokers, and LSD takers. His listeners, his applauders immediately conjure up a picture of scruffy, nihilistic hooligans. Yet the President may be talking about some of the most promising young men on the campuses at Berkeley, Chicago, Harvard, and Yale—young men who, like Benjamin, are the sons of our best-educated and most privileged class, and should, by tradition, inherit the country.

The Benjamin of the fifties—the Benjamin of the movie—makes trouble for a while, but pretty soon he comes around. In a lecture, Nichols informed an audience of Brandeis students that Benjamin would end up like his parents. Although this remains unsaid in the film—young audiences would find it unbearably offensive—it functions perpetually to integrate Benjamin’s flirtation with dropping out into a reassuring psychological tag, “the difficult phase.” “The Graduate” offers youth a subversive message: You cannot sustain an opposition to America; find someone to submit with, if you can. It seems unaware that history has upped the price of submission. In the fifties, “conformity” was the dragon against which valedictorians tilted their earnest lances. The trap of the sixties is complicity. The Benjamin that contemporary reality suggests could no longer imagine a life of quiet desperation in a social vacuum. He would begin to formulate definitions of “making it” all his own. He would concern himself with getting off, not with getting on. He might be driven by the need to change the system or to take revenge upon it. He might care only to ignore it or to take it for a ride. But he would not still interpret himself in its terms. He would perceive his role with a certain detached irony, recognizing himself to be a particular person—with a birth, some years in the world, a death—whose “business” had not yet become the business of being alive, and was colored with absurdity.

There are now a million such Benjamins, with visions of a healthier culture. At this moment, young people in the vanguard of change feel little hope for their chances. Many are possessed by paranoid visions of our collective future; thrown into relief by the reassurances of our official culture, they appear deranged. Indeed, by refusing to explore the terrible tension with which young Americans now experience their relation to America, and by suggesting the patterns of dissidence in figures as unpersuasive as Benjamin, the culture insists upon their derangement. If television, magazines, or at least a serious film like “The Graduate” reflected how grievously expectations for America have shrunk, a great many more young people would begin to discover one another. They would come to recognize the sudden prevalence of their own response and to believe more deeply in its aptness. The true Benjamins—those who feel themselves isolated, suspended in limbo between Lyndon Johnson and Ken Kesey, between acquiescence and domestic guerrillahood—would come to understand the depths of their fellowship and their strength.

I suggested earlier that the principal reason Benjamin couldn’t look forward to becoming an adult was that his environment had offered him no viable ideal of adulthood. He had to imagine for himself what a creditable grown-up life might look like, and he failed to come up with much of a picture. It’s unlikely that the efforts of others to conceive and test out new life styles would escape a person of Benjamin’s particular background. (Think of it: the new politics, the new bohemia, student power, the sexual revolution, acid, rock, the underground press—all germinated on his home turf. Where was he?) Yet such efforts cannot directly reach large numbers of young people who are removed from the heartland of changing social consciousness. These people are still like the Benjamin of the movie—put off, ready to pass up the fruits of their preparation, but wholly uncertain as to their options. Isolated and starved by the culture, they face a crisis of imagination. They can learn of their peers’ experiments only through the fun-house mirrors of the news media. Movies, the obvious source of help, have not begun to depict adult lives that thoughtful young people might admire or imitate; nor have they begun to examine, with any respect, young people going about the adult business of trying to find something propitious in their lives and their country. “The Graduate” has been accorded a reception like that of “The Catcher in the Rye,” even though it scarcely elaborates on the attitudes of adolescent discontent that Salinger’s book helped to reveal, and create, seventeen years ago. If we give unreserved praise to our cultural leaders for a vision of youth that ignores a generation’s worth of change, we must expect them to remain as barren of relevance as our political leaders. “The Graduate,” which in the end only quickens our perception of dead-end alternatives, begins with the radical intimation that there is some choice to be made on the threshold of adulthood—some yes-or-no decision about one’s future in American society. A film artist with the intelligence and the tremendous prestige of Mike Nichols should now begin to lay bare the nature of that choice, if it still exists. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

Searching for the cause of a catastrophic plane crash .

The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool .

Gloria Steinem’s life on the feminist frontier .

Where the Amish go on vacation .

How Colonel Sanders built his Kentucky-fried fortune .

What does procrastination tell us about ourselves ?

Fiction by Patricia Highsmith: “The Trouble with Mrs. Blynn, the Trouble with the World”

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Pauline Kael

By Michael Sragow

By Rivka Galchen

By David Remnick

The Graduate 50 Years After Its Oscar Win

Revisiting a film embraced by the 1968 generation

A still of Dustin Hoffman, as Benjamin Braddock, in 'The Graduate'

In 1968, The Graduate was nominated for seven Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Director. The film would go on to clinch the Best Director Oscar for Mike Nichols, launch the career of Dustin Hoffman, and stir nationwide controversy for its transgressive plot: 21-year-old Benjamin Braddock returns home from college, struggles to find direction, and is seduced by a woman who is twice his age—Mrs. Robinson, the wife of his father’s business partner, played to critical acclaim by Anne Bancroft. Their lust-based affair is cut short when Ben falls in love with Mrs. Robinson’s daughter, Elaine, sparking an intractable conflict between the determined young man and his elders.

Discussing the now-classic motion picture 50 years after its win at the Oscars are Conor Friedersdorf, Adrienne LaFrance, Megan Garber, and Christopher Orr.

Friedersdorf: When I saw The Graduate at 20 or 21 it immediately became one of my favorite movies—I’d soon finish college; I hadn’t the foggiest notion of what I’d do next; and I could easily imagine myself like Ben in the opening scene: overwhelmed by a welcome home party; escaping to my childhood bedroom; wracked with anxiety about how to pursue a meaningful life. What did I want? Like Ben, I couldn’t have said, save that it wasn’t anything among my options, or that I could name … just a feeling. I too wanted my future to be … “different.”

The Pop Innovations of a 50-Year-Old Soundtrack

An illustration of a weekly calendar, with each day represented by its first letter and the letters "WTF" highlighted in red

We Live By a Unit of Time That Doesn’t Make Sense

The "distracted boyfriend" meme gets reversed.

The Bored Sex

All these years later, reading reviews of The Graduate for The Atlantic’ s year-long retrospective on 1968, I was struck by how many critics emphasized something I was oblivious to on my first, second, and third viewings in college: the theme of 1960s generational conflict. Take Roger Ebert. Back then, he savaged the milieu of Ben’s parents as “ferociously stupid,” complaining that his family and their friends “demand that he perform in the role of Successful Young Upward-Venturing Clean-Cut All-American College Grad” and pronouncing Ben “so painfully awkward and ethical that we are forced to admit we would act pretty much as he does, even in his most extreme moments.”

Thirty years later, when Ebert returned to the film, his allegiances had changed:

Well, here *is* to you, Mrs. Robinson: You’ve survived your defeat at the hands of that insufferable creep, Benjamin, and emerged as the most sympathetic and intelligent character in The Graduate . How could I ever have thought otherwise? What murky generational politics were distorting my view the first time I saw this film? Watching the 30th anniversary revival of The Graduate is like looking at photos of yourself at an old fraternity dance. You’re gawky and your hair is plastered down with Brylcreem, and your date looks as if you found her behind the counter at the Dairy Queen. But—who’s the babe in the corner? The great-looking brunette with the wide-set eyes and the full lips and the knockout figure? Hey, it’s the chaperone! Great movies remain themselves over the generations; they retain a serene sense of their own identity. Lesser movies are captives of their time. They get dated and lose their original focus and power. The Graduate (I can see clearly now) is a lesser movie. It comes out of a specific time in the late 1960s when parents stood for stodgy middle-class values, and “the kids” were joyous rebels at the cutting edge of the sexual and political revolutions. Benjamin Braddock ( Dustin Hoffman ), the clueless hero of The Graduate , was swept in on that wave of feeling, even though it is clear today that he was utterly unaware of his generation and existed outside time and space (he seems most at home at the bottom of a swimming pool).

Today, I’m closer in age to Mrs. Robinson than to Ben. And I’d be revising my opinion of the movie, too, had I thought, on original viewing, that Ben struck a righteous blow on behalf of the younger generation. (Or, if I’d imagined, as the New Republic ’s bygone critic did, that “what is truly daring, and therefore refreshing, is the film’s moral stance. Its acceptance of the fact that a young man might have an affair with a woman and still marry her daughter—a situation not exactly unheard of in America although not previously seen in American films—is part of the film’s fundamental insistence: that life, today, in our world, is not worth living unless one can prove it day-by-day, by values that ring true day-by-day.”)

But I wasn’t alienated from my parents or the values of their generation circa 2000; I sympathized with the taboo that would prevent someone from having an affair with a mother then dating her daughter; and I never thought Ben’s parents were anything worse than mildly annoying and a bit blind to their son’s anxieties. (And didn’t they keep advising Ben that he should date Elaine from the start?)

The movie remains a masterpiece, to me, because it captures the existential anxieties of both Ben and Mrs. Robinson, even if the youngish viewer may only appreciate the former’s perspective, and see the movie anew only after reaching the age when one realizes that one’s parents and their friends are people, too.

Orr: It’s funny that you cite those Ebert reviews, Conor. I remember them well, having read the latter years ago and then gone back to read the former. I thought his about-face wildly wrongheaded then and, if anything, even more so now.

What made Ebert such a great critic was that at his core he was an enthusiast, and this is a case where I think his enthusiasms got the better of him, in both directions. It’s obviously not The Graduate that underwent a change in identity between Ebert’s early and late opinions of it; it’s Ebert who did. If anything, his radical reevaluation of the movie speaks to how well it captured its generational divide: Ebert adored it when he was on the “right” side of the divide and reviled it once he reached the “wrong” one.

Like you, I didn’t see the film until college (I was 1 year old when it was released), and like you, it did not speak to me so personally that I felt any obligation to pick sides. It was not a vibrant, political cry, but already an acknowledged “classic,” tamed and domesticated by the passage of years. Nonetheless, rewatching it recently I was struck by the degree to which it is an almost perfect document of its moment—a moment that felt to many like a cultural “hinge” between a dreary present that was merely a monotonous continuation of the past, and an unknown future that, whatever it might contain, had to be better.

Nearly every scene in the film—nearly every line—makes this case in one form or another. In the opening party scene, there’s the line you cite about Ben wanting his “future” to be “different,” followed almost immediately by Mr. McGuire’s recommendation that there’s a great “future” in plastics. In the next scene, at the Robinsons’, Ben twice more expresses concern about his “future.” The older characters, by contrast, don’t seem to have any future ahead of them at all. Mr. Robinson laments that he’d like to be Ben’s age again, before vicariously recommending that Ben “sow a few wild oats.” Mrs. Robinson, of course, goes further, essentially living out her husband’s fantasy of youthful indiscretion.

Throughout the film, the adults around Ben have an almost vampiric attachment to him, as if they can regain their own youth by stealing his. Mrs. Robinson takes this to the greatest extreme, but it recurs repeatedly in lesser forms.

Ben’s parents use him essentially as a party favor on not one but two occasions (his homecoming and his fish-in-a-bowl 21st birthday party), and they exhibit an unhealthy obsession with getting Ben to date the daughter of his dad’s business partner. When Ben arrives at the Taft Hotel for his first assignation with Mrs. Robinson, he is met with an outflux of elderly guests. It’s as if by entering the building he is crossing the threshold not merely into adulthood but into middle age.

And I very much doubt that it is a coincidence that the montage set to “The Sound of Silence” and “April Come She Will” ends with the line, “A love once new has now grown old.”

As the movie progresses, the theme of generational warfare only becomes more conspicuous. In the middle of their tryst, Mrs. Robinson tells Ben, “I just don’t think we have much to say to each other.” He in turn calls her “a broken-down alcoholic.” Ben, who drives a trim and modern little Alfa Romeo, openly mocks the idea that Elaine was conceived in a Ford—literally, the oldest make of mass-produced car in existence. When Mrs. Robinson forbids Ben from taking out Elaine she is, for all intents and purposes, trying to prevent him from returning to his youthful tribe and keep him trapped in this simulacrum of middle age.

And when Ben does take Elaine out, it’s little wonder that he tells her she’s “the first person I could stand to be with.” She is literally the only person his own age that we have seen up to this point in the entire film. Ben appears to have no friends or contemporaries of any kind. He’s like Charlton Heston, but rather than apes he’s found himself trapped on the Planet of the Old People.

I think the movie starts to fall apart as soon as Ben follows Elaine to Berkeley. It loses focus and plausibility—can any human being actually be as passive as Elaine?—and plays almost like a wish-fulfillment dream sequence that Ben will eventually wake up from, a la Brazil. (It is, as Ben himself notes, “completely baked.”)

But the theme of generational conflict continues. His middle-aged landlord (Norman Fell!) wants him out, because “I don’t like you.” Mr. Robinson asks if Ben despises him or “just the things I stand for.” Even Ben’s romantic rival, Carl Smith, though theoretically of the same generation, is presented as prematurely aged. Who brings a pipe to the zoo? I think the proper answer is no one. But if anyone did, they would almost certainly be old. When Elaine tells Ben that Carl proposed to her, he replies, “He didn’t get down on his knees, I hope?” as if that would be the squarest, most old-fashioned gesture imaginable.

In the end, of course, Ben rescues Elaine from the premature old age that Carl represents. (Note, again, that apart from bride and groom there appear to be virtually no young folk at the wedding—Elaine is essentially marrying into the Planet of the Old People.) Elaine flees the altar, despite having already married Carl, and she and Ben hop a bus to get out of there. (Whatever else you may think of it, that’s certainly not square or old-fashioned.) Which leads to the most crucial scene of the movie, and the one that I think puts the lie to Ebert’s latter-day assessment. As the bus pulls away to “The Sound of Silence,” it finally dawns on Ben and Elaine that they have absolutely no idea what this future they’ve been clawing toward might hold for them. (Anyone who remembers the ’70s will recall that the decade was on no level paradise.) The new, highly dubious couple is, belatedly if appropriately, terrified. Loathing the present is a far cry from having any idea how to build a better future.

LaFrance: I can’t believe I never noticed there are no young people at the wedding! I love The Graduate . It is, to me, a perfect film. No shot is wasted. Every moment is deliberate. The “Sound of Silence/April Come She Will” montage still amazes me—not just the clever cinematography, but also because of how it condenses all of the film’s tension into four Oedipal minutes, all without dialogue.

One thing that’s always perplexed me about the film, though, has to do with the generational divide that you both mentioned. The film is set in the late 1960s, and the soundtrack is decidedly of that moment, but everything else about it feels stuck in the late 1950s. There is no mention of Vietnam—barely an allusion to it, other than Simon and Garfunkel’s lyrics. There is no pot-smoking or protesting. Benjamin Braddock is clean-cut and clean shaven—we actually see him shaving in multiple scenes. He often wears a tie. Even the drive-up hamburger joint where Benjamin and Elaine go after their first date has a decidedly Tab Hunter vibe to it. And when the kids parked in the car next to Benjamin’s (forever-dreamy) Alfa Romeo start blasting “The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine,” Benjamin leans over and asks them to turn down the volume.

Maybe all this is by design. The moment at the burger stand underscores how Benjamin was already hopeless against any effort to avoid turning out just like his cocktail-generation parents. He’s just as phony as they are. Besides, a moviegoer in 1967 wouldn’t have needed a reminder of the war, or of the extent to which it fueled resentment among the Baby Boomers being drafted at the time. I don’t quite understand how young audiences would have seen Benjamin’s stupefaction in the face of a future beyond his control as righteous—or even particularly rebellious. There’s really nothing countercultural about running off with the pretty girl next door.

Orr: You’ve inspired me to offer a super-quick response, Adrienne. In my entry, I’d considered throwing in a few lines about Rebel Without a Cause , another of the defining examples of the American generational-conflict subgenre. (It’s even set, like The Graduate , in L.A. County.) But it didn’t occur to me that, among their many similarities, the two movies seem to catalogue a similar generational divide, despite the fact that Rebel was released 12 years earlier—and 12 years that, given what was happening in the country at the time, might as well have been 25. (The Charles Webb novel that The Graduate was based on was written in 1963, but still.)

I’d honestly never given much thought to the way that The Graduate is simultaneously of its moment and seemingly from another decade altogether. Even the Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack, while technically mid-to-late 60s, is really a form of throwback music. One of their principal influences was the Everly Brothers; the two duos even toured together in the early 2000s. As noted, I was (literally) a baby in 1968, but it’s hard to think of a less rebellious, more “square” choice of contemporaneous musical accompaniment than old Paul and Art.

Garber: Those are such good points—I’d never considered how out-of-its-time The Graduate is. And I think one generous reading of the ’50s/’60s thing—generous to The Graduate itself—is one that sees the decade discrepancy serving the other theme you three were discussing: the generational tensions at play. The way young people and older people can have of talking past each other, of willfully misunderstanding each other, even of battling each other—a dynamic the movie so deftly captures.

One of the things I appreciate about The Graduate is how horribly hermetic Nichols et al. managed to make its universe (that universe being, like you said, Chris, L.A.—traditionally a place of sunniness and breeziness and fantasy and possibility). Here, though, L.A. is stifling. That plane. That pool. That fish tank. That diving suit, with its ridiculous flippers smacking awkwardly on the kitchen floor. There’s so much visual emphasis on doors, here, too … doors open, but, much more often, doors shut. Possibilities foreclosed.

And—here’s, maybe, a connection to the film’s (lack of) overt political context you were discussing—that sense of thwarted potential nicely emphasizes Ben’s (and, really, pretty much all the other characters’) extreme myopia: their inability to see, or really to care, beyond themselves. A self-absorption that is so all-encompassing that it never occurs to anyone involved to question or attempt to correct it.

So, in that sense, maybe it’s fitting that there’s no war in this movie. Or, for that matter, a civil-rights struggle, or a women’s movement, or political strife of any kind. Those absences could definitely be an oversight, but they could also be part of the point: In a movie about people who are as thoroughly selfish as these characters are—a movie that is about stifled people as much as it’s about stifled dreams—the broader world has no place. This universe is small, and solipsism reigns.

But! That’s, like I said, the generous reading of things. And I’m not actually sure that I’m fully convinced by it. Because, overall, I’m with Roger Ebert: I largely disliked The Graduate on rewatching it. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t appreciate it, still (I completely agree, Adrienne, there is some amazing filmmaking in it), but it is to say that it frustrated me and angered me and left me, in the end, cold.

Chris, you mentioned how the movie falls apart in its second half, and I so deeply agree. As far as I’m concerned that’s in large part because its plot hangs so insistently on the motivations of one Elaine Robinson. And those motivations … make no sense at all. Like, truly, none. She goes on one horrible-and-insulting-but-then-better-because-burgers(?) date with Ben; she thinks (or maybe allows herself to believe) that Ben raped her mother; she realizes the full truth; she comes back to him anyway. He asks her to marry him; she initially says no; he is legitimately surprised that she won’t acquiesce to him. I realize this is the era of the feminine mystique, and that Ben might represent to Elaine the very strain of rebelliousness that her mother represented to Ben … but that’s another generous reading, because the film treats Elaine, for the most part, as an eyelash-batting plot device. “I know what I’m doing is the best thing for you,” Elaine writes to Ben in a note about her future, and: sigh.

I could definitely be missing something. Maybe, sure, all the absurdity is the point. The New York Times review , from late 1967, called The Graduate “one of the best seriocomic social satires we’ve had from Hollywood since Preston Sturges was making them.” Maybe my sense of satire has been so thoroughly calibrated to 2018 standards that I can no longer appreciate the strain of “seriocomedy” Elaine’s character arc represents. Maaaaaaaybe The Graduate is a kind of pre– Breaking Bad Breaking Bad : a good guy slowly transformed into an agent of chaos, the transformation propelled not by financial need, but by its opposite. Maybe we’re watching Ben’s descent into conformity/rebellion/an exciting future in plastics. Maybe we’re seeing the makings of the “me decade,” festering in the L.A. sun. Maybe Elaine’s baffling passivity is a work of sly feminism. Maybe?

Still, though: Team Ebert.

Because, watching The Graduate in 2018, I was not at all convinced that the film is self-aware enough to know what it’s mocking, and for that matter what it’s endorsing (besides, evidently, the work of Simon and Garfunkel). The movie seems, itself, thoroughly Team Ben—despite his moral descent, and maybe even because of it.

The film that is named for him gives Ben everything he wanted. It asks basically nothing of him in return, save for a lot of car-driving and flop-sweating. And: It turns Elaine into a stooge, robbed of reason and agency. (And that’s not even getting to the character of Mrs. Robinson—which, Team Ebert again.) The violin the audience is being asked to play here is so very, very small. And as much as I appreciate The Graduate , still, on a scene-by-scene and frame-by-frame basis—on that level, it is magisterial—overall, I couldn’t get over its Poe’s Law failings. The movie didn’t sell me as satire. But if it’s not satire … what is it?

LaFrance: Maybe I’m going too easy on Mike Nichols, the director, but I always figured the Robinson women (not to mention Mrs. Braddock) were so one-dimensional because we’re seeing the events of the film totally through Benjamin’s eyes and delusions. Consider again the famous “April Come She Will” montage: all of those tight shots on Ben’s face; and the fact that we pretty much only see Mrs. Robinson’s torso, in various states of undress, to mark the passage of time; and then the view of his mother in the final shot of the sequence, where she’s basically indistinguishable from Mrs. Robinson. (Of course you’re right that Elaine is absurdly and unreasonably passive, but I have to say Katharine Ross’s eyelashes are legit amazing.)

There’s a story I once read about a dinner-party exchange between Nichols and his long-time comedic partner Elaine May. She apparently asked, off-handedly, something like, You know what I can’t stand about God ? And Nichols replied, without pausing, That he hates arrogance but doesn’t mind cruelty . I always remembered that line because it’s pithy, and also because it’s pure Benjamin Braddock: hates arrogance, but doesn’t mind cruelty. Resents the establishment, and fights back by conforming. And just like the rest of The Graduate , if it weren’t so sad, it’d be hilarious.

Orr: I find myself caught between your two poles of outright Graduate -love and Ebert-y disdain. I find the first two-thirds of the movie genuinely brilliant but, as noted, feel it falls apart badly in the final act—like you, Megan, largely because nothing Elaine Robinson does makes a lick of sense. You’re right, Adrienne, that the movie is told almost exclusively from Ben’s perspective, but that doesn’t prevent Mrs. Robinson from being a complex and fascinating character.

Elaine is just a dud.

Megan went through most of the particulars, though I’d add that Elaine contemporaneously tells not one, but two men—neither of whom seems remotely appealing—that she “might” marry them. Then ultimately she lets her parents make the decision for her (what is she, 9?) before impulsively abandoning her now-husband for a glass-banging lunatic who she knows slept with her mother. She seems devoid of even the slightest hint of agency, literally inclined to do whatever the last male character to speak to her tells her to do. And, no Megan, I think there’s zero chance that this was a deliberate bit of sexual satire.

Not to throw stones unnecessarily, but the failures of the character are exacerbated by the fact that Ross is simply not a good actress. She lucked into roles in two classic films ( The Graduate and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid two years later) and two other culturally relevant ones (1975’s The Stepford Wives and 1976’s Voyage of the Damned ), but she’s not particularly good in any of them. Ironically, while we’re on the subject of marital indecisiveness, Ross had four brief marriages during the period of her semi-stardom. Happily, she seems to have finally gotten it right in 1984 by marrying Sam Elliott, whom she’s still with. Perhaps there’s hope for Elaine after all.

Garber: Chris, you mentioned that Mrs. Robinson is “a complex and fascinating character,” and, YES, I so agree. To me, she redeems this movie in so many ways. Even though, like you said, Adrienne, so much of her character, just like so much of Elaine’s character, is filtered through Ben-o-vision … there’s still such richness that comes through. And in some part, I think, precisely because of the psychic distance the movie imposes on her.

Mrs. Robinson has such a feline quality to her: She moves so quickly, so intentionally, so efficiently. She swathes herself in leopard print, and tiger print, as if she were trying to summon the spirit of the creatures in question. ( According to Wikipedia , which would totally never lie about such things, the use of the term cougar to suggest an older woman who dates a much-younger man didn’t come about until this century; I wonder whether the deeper roots of it, though, aren’t in Mrs. Robinson and her jungle-feline-tastic loungewear.) There’s something so … I don’t know, precarious about her character. She threatens. She lurks. She seethes, quietly. One of the things I appreciate so much about Bancroft’s performance is how deftly she strikes a balance between coolness and ferocity: There’s so much simmering beneath that self-controlled surface. So much anger. So much pain. So much sadness that she takes out not just on her husband, and not just on her daughter, but also on “Benjamin.”

And, speaking of that! One of the things that struck me in a way it hadn’t quite before was how deeply predatory Mrs. Robinson is toward Ben—especially at the beginning of their (romantic) relationship. (And that’s doubly striking, of course, and sadly ironic, given that Hoffman himself has been accused of sexual assault .) After Ben drives Mrs. Robinson home from his party, he tries to leave; she will not let him. He resists; she ignores him. She slams the door. She takes her clothes off. He resists again. She insists. It is not necessarily played as an interaction that is deeply uncomfortable; it struck me as deeply uncomfortable nonetheless. We said in the intro to this conversation that Ben and Mrs. Robinson have a “lust-based affair,” but this is another question I had about the movie: Were we really witnessing lust? Perhaps that was Nichols’s and the other filmmakers’ intention, that Ben was successfully seduced; for me, though, I got no sense at all of (sexual) chemistry between Hoffman and Bancroft, and thus between Ben and Mrs. Robinson. Their affair felt to me like an ongoing case of mutual exploitation. Two sad people, using each other. A time bomb, ticking.

And, of course, that could be the point, as well: an affair that is profoundly cynical, but—both despite and because of the cynicism—cinematically interesting.

To return to the generational tensions you guys discussed above, one of the things I find most fascinating about Mrs. Robinson is how aligned she and Ben ultimately are in their anxieties. Ben, here, is being confronted with a kind of death: of youth, of possibility, of freedom. So, too, is Mrs. Robinson—not with a physical death, necessarily, but with the death of her purpose, her value, her identity. She lived during a time when upper-class women were appreciated primarily as wives and mothers, when little more was expected of them than to marry and procreate; as the film plays out, though, her daughter leaves for college, and for a life of her own. Her marriage is stifling. She has, seemingly, no job, no hobbies, no friends, nothing but an empty house that she fills with meaningless symbols of distant wildness. She is rich, and, at the same time, she is robbed—of the stuff that makes a full life and a full person. The film never reveals her first name; she is merely “Mrs. Robinson”: a name, but not a self. What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson? The song, gah, never bothers to find out.

Friedersdorf: You’re so right, Megan, that the complexity of Mrs. Robinson is among the film’s strongest features—and one accomplished so efficiently! Is there any more efficient dialogue-driven scene in any film than Ben’s failed attempt at pillow talk, which begins with Mrs. Robinson declaring that she has no interest in talking about art and ends with her admission that she majored in the subject?

To me, the film is impossible to imagine without Bancroft—and as impossible to imagine with Robert Redford cast as Benjamin Braddock, which almost happened. The alternative Elaine Robinson was Candice Bergen. Chris, maybe you’d have liked her better? But I’m going to undertake a brief defense of the film as it was made, granting that Elaine’s motivation was obscure enough to be a weakness, but defending the last third of the film nevertheless.

Begin with what I take to be the most charitable reading of Elaine: Nichols is showing us the character through Ben’s eyes, as Adrienne suggested—and for that reason, those parts of the story almost require her to be devoid of personality, because Ben isn’t ever seeing her for who she is—he sees in this person he barely knows the woman of his dreams because that’s what inexperienced, self-centered, insecure 21-year-old men do amid hopeful, anxious, romantic fantasies about being destined for a “different” future.

Had Ben ever seen the real Elaine you wouldn’t have that moment on the bus, at the ending, when it suddenly occurs to Ben that he doesn’t actually know Elaine at all.

That late scene in church is when the audience gets its best glimpse of Elaine, and in it her actions make more sense, I think. We don’t really know how long she’d dated Carl or what their relationship was like (though one surmises “the old makeout king” wasn’t unlike Mr. Robinson and his Ford). But we do know she was raised by Mrs. Robinson. We know how assertive, acerbic, manipulative, quick to anger, and vindictive Mrs. Robinson could be. And that she was an alcoholic.

Imagine being raised by someone like that—or check out any website for adult children of alcoholics:

Many of us found that we had several characteristics in common as a result of being brought up in an alcoholic or dysfunctional household. We had come to feel isolated and uneasy with other people, especially authority figures. To protect ourselves, we became people-pleasers, even though we lost our own identities in the process … We preferred to be concerned with others rather than ourselves. We got guilt feelings when we stood up for ourselves rather than giving in to others. Thus, we became reactors, rather than actors, letting others take the initiative. We were dependent personalities, terrified of abandonment, willing to do almost anything to hold on to a relationship in order not to be abandoned emotionally. Yet we kept choosing insecure relationships because they matched our childhood relationship with alcoholic or dysfunctional parents.

Of course Elaine barely stood up for herself on her first date with Ben, quickly forgave him, and acceded when her parents pressured her to marry Carl. She’d spent her whole life avoiding conflict, trying to please, going along to get along—and hatred of having to do so finally erupted in a spectacular at-the-altar rebellion. What strikes me about that scene in the church is that Elaine’s decision to run off with Ben has less to do with him than the reaction his appearance evokes in others: the hatred on the faces of her mother and father, and her horror-struck realization that Carl’s face is warped by the very same expression.

Elaine didn’t run to Ben—she ran away from a relationship with her mother so broken that she disbelieved her claim that she’d been raped, and from a marriage like that of her parents. Ebert was wrong twice. He shouldn’t have been rooting for Ben or Mrs. Robinson. We all should’ve been rooting for poor Elaine all along!

Finally, about that ending: The Graduate has a fantastic ending! Yes, the genius “What have we done?!” moment on the bus—but also the climactic scene in the church that preceded it, with a crucifix wielded to block the door; and the scene before that, with so much information conveyed in the faces of Elaine and her parents; and the moment before that, when Ben seemed to have arrived too late.

All that happened in the final third!

I admit that, more than most people, I am a sucker for sun-kissed footage of semi-suspenseful drives up and down Highway 101, which could be skewing my assessment here. But I submit that many folks remember liking The Graduate more on first viewings, when revisiting it years later, because they’ve forgotten the suspense and fun of seeing the film without knowing that final sequence.

What do you think, readers? Your thoughts on The Graduate are welcome, especially if you saw the film at different stages of life, or in late 1967 or 1968 and can speak to how it was received by the first generation to see it. Email [email protected] and note if you don’t want your name used if I publish an excerpt.

The Graduate Review: As Seductive as Ever

Harry Solomons
March 22, 2022

Now as iconic as any great of the 1960s, The Graduate remains, by far, the most joyful treatise on the divide between the American young and old.

We first see Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman, in his first truly star-making role) in transit; this title figure of The Graduate has just completed his studies at a prestigious, unnamed eastern American university and is returning home to California with a string of accolades and qualifications to his name. Immediately, he is set upon by a crowd gathered by his oppressively doting parents, a gaggle of family friends throwing myriad career prospects and titbits of wisdom in his face, clamouring to the point of claustrophobia. When Ben finally manages to escape this throng and cloister himself in his bedroom, he encounters the all-too-assured and never-fully-named Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft), a married family friend who swiftly cajoles him into giving her a ride home. This is where Ben’s life takes its first unforeseen turn – the beginning of a tumultuous and disastrous love affair that throws the generational divide in the 1960s into sharp focus.

There’s a sense of a very European kind of malaise throughout The Graduate , as if director Mike Nichols had transplanted a Truffaut romance into the heart of the American upper-middle class . Ben possesses that Bohemian kind of ennui, despite having absolutely no semblance of a Bohemian lifestyle – it is only when his affair with Mrs Robinson becomes his all-consuming direction in life that a previously prescribed course of direction for his career and personal life begins to fall apart. The impact of the height of the 1960s college counterculture is unavoidable here, as Ben’s family represents one of the surest cinematic examples of the culture that needs countering: white, wealthy, oppressively ‘comfortable’ and pressuring Ben to carve out the same good fortune as they had done. It’s not until the entirely self-motivated intervention of Mrs Robinson that Ben stops being a passive participant in his own life, and the destructiveness of that decision haunts the rest of the film.

Hoffman is, clearly, the star of the show here, and it’s a role he shoulders with a maturity unbecoming of a star in their first ever leading role. Hoffman has repeatedly given a large part of credit for his career as a whole to Nichols, who took a huge risk bringing on an unknown actor for what became, by far, the most commercially successful film of his directorial lifetime; however, it’s fairly clear what Nichols must have seen in Hoffman, too. Hoffman embodies this figure who knows exactly what he is supposed to say in any situation, but almost seems two seconds too slow to get it out; he has at the very least a conscious knowledge of his own self-worth, but needs to remind himself of these facts constantly and deliberately in any given social situation. It is by no accident that a generation of young American men saw themselves in Hoffman’s performance, and it is a masterful turn that makes Ben just about unlikeable enough to force them into introspection.

loud and clear reviews the graduate film dustin hoffman

This performance is delightfully counterbalanced by both of the generations of Robinson women that Ben becomes entangled with, as well as by the adult figures omnipresent in Ben’s life. Anne Bancroft somehow manages to embody an almost otherworldly force of nature, despite only being 35 years old when the film was produced, and manages to make sudden lurches between despicable antagonist and relatable, tragic figure seem justified and natural. She plays one of several adult characters who have a veneer of inaccessibility, as if they exist in an entirely separate realm of consciousness to Ben, and it seems as though Mrs Robinson is the only one capable of breaking through that façade. Mrs Robinson’s daughter Elaine ( Katharine Ross ), however, seems to simultaneously exist within and without Ben’s world, and their mutual infatuation seems to be almost entirely constructed upon a fundamental and untested compatibility – this uneasiness and lack of certainty in their blossoming relationship, as Hoffman and Ross deliver it, is what drives the movie, seemingly inescapably, towards its climax.

All this is to ignore a rather large aspect of the film: it is incredibly funny . Calder Willingham and Buck Henry’s script has become so iconic as to have become clichéd in the years since release, and with good reason as quotes and scenes have become embedded in popular culture, parodied by everybody from The Simpsons to Bustedto Reeves and Mortimer’s Renault adverts. Similarly, its visual comedy feels remarkably fresh and progressive for a film of the 1960s, and one can draw a clear thread of influence between Robert Surtees’ camerawork and the films of John Hughes two decades later. Paul Simon’s soundtrack has also taken on a life of its own outside of the film, with the song “Mrs Robinson” rivalling the movie for modern-day popularity, and so hearing such an early version of the song as part of the movie’s soundtrack is perhaps a little thrilling – even if hearing “Scarborough Fair” for the fourth time in seven minutes can begin to grate.

Of course, when discussing a film such as The Graduate the question of its aging should be brought to the forefront. There’s little that has become overly controversial about the film since its release, but a few critics such as Roger Ebert who raved about the film contemporaneously soured on it a little as both they and the movie itself aged. There is widespread consensus that it is Mrs Robinson, not Ben, who becomes the sympathetic touchstone of the movie to an older viewer, as one finds themselves drawn across to the other side of the generational divide, at which point Ben’s attempts to dislodge himself from his pre-defined place in an adult world make him into more of a snivelling, weaselly character than can be easily determined by a twenty-something viewer. To me, this simply marks the film as an even greater success; as we enter a period of increased worldwide generational divide , and younger generations appear to be the first in decades in the west to be financially worse off than their parents, a film such as The Graduate that plays to both sides of this conflict remains blissfully resonant, and more than a joy to revisit.

The Graduate was released on December 21, 1967, and is now available to watch on digital, on demand , and on DVD & Blu-Ray.

The True Meaning of Interstellar: Is Anyone Out There?

Jack Walters
April 9, 2024
Films , Must Watch

Hundreds of Beavers Review: Insanity on Film

Wesley Hunt
Must Watch , TV

Earthsounds review: Apple TV’s coolest nature series

Keeley Brooks

Sweet Dreams Film Review: Predictably Bright

Aaron Murray

Movie Giveaway! Win Blu-Ray: The Taste of Things

Loud And Clear Reviews

Civil War Review: A Dark Look at a Divided Nation

Joseph Tomastik

LATEST POSTS

"We waste our money so you don't have to."

"We waste our money, so you don't have to."

Movie Review

The graduate.

US Release Date: 12-22-1967

Directed by: Mike Nichols

Starring ▸ ▾

Anne Bancroft , as
Mrs. Robinson
Dustin Hoffman , as
Ben Braddock
Katharine Ross , as
Elaine Robinson
William Daniels , as
Mr. Braddock
Murray Hamilton , as
Mr. Robinson
Elizabeth Wilson , as
Mrs. Braddock
Buck Henry , as
Brian Avery , as
Walter Brooke , as
Mr. McGuire
Norman Fell , as
Mr. McCleery
Alice Ghostley , as
Mrs. Singleman
Marion Lorne , as
Miss DeWitte
Eddra Gale , as
Woman on Bus
Richard Dreyfuss , as
Boarding House Resident
Mike Farrell , as
Bellhop in Hotel Lobby
Elaine May as
Girl with Note for Benjamin

Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate .

The Graduate is, without a doubt, an iconic American classic that helped redefine cinema at the height of the counter culture revolution of the late 1960s. It was groundbreaking in its depiction of sex, as well as in its camera movement and editing style, and hugely influential in its use of pop songs to underscore scenes. Mike Nichols won the Best Director Oscar in what was just his second time at bat. The Graduate also launched the career of Dustin Hoffman who would go on to be one of the great male movie stars of the latter half of the 20th Century.

Based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Charles Webb, this is the story of Benjamin Braddock, the titular scholar. This movie depicts the events of his first post-college summer, spent at his parent's house in Southern California. Benjamin has no plans for his future and he's overwhelmed with a feeling of isolation (brilliantly depicted by Nichols in several scenes, most notably when Benjamin is submersed in scuba gear in his parent's swimming pool). There is the famous scene where he gets one word of advice from a friend of his parents, “Plastics.” But Benjamin is content to spend his time lazing about the pool soaking up sunshine.

And then he takes Mrs. Robinson home from a party one evening. She wastes little time cornering him in her daughter's bedroom and disrobing, prompting Benjamin's famous statement of the obvious, “Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me.” The scene where they have their first tryst at the hotel is hilarious (it includes a comic turn by Buck Henry who also adapted the screenplay). In fact it is almost too funny for the rest of the movie, which has a decidedly more dramatic tone.

This shift begins to occur when Benjamin discovers that he and Mrs. Robinson (none of the middle-aged adults in the movie are given first names) have nothing in common but sex. After much prompting he does get her to open up a bit about her past; she reveals that she was pregnant when she got married. But she makes it clear that sexual gratification is the only thing she requires of him.

The real shift in tone happens when Benjamin reluctantly takes Mrs. Robinson's daughter Elaine out on a date. From this point on there are only occasional glimmers of humor. He is at first purposefully rude, even going so far as to take her to a sleazy strip joint. After Elaine breaks down sobbing, Benjamin kisses her and falls head over heels. She leads Benjamin on a chase up to Berkeley before the story heads to its famous climax at the church, where the young lovers make their escape on that bus to nowhere. And all to the tune of Simon & Garfunkel.

When I saw this movie as a teenager in the 80s I remember being completely caught up in the romance between Benjamin and Elaine. I thoroughly believed in their happily ever after. Although to be honest I didn't really spend much time thinking about their future together. Now I realize that Nichols is strongly suggesting the opposite. That it's more likely these two young lovers are destined to turn out similar to their parents. He'll probably wind up in plastics and she'll be a discontented housewife. Despite this one act of youthful rebellion, they aren't really rebels at all.

If anyone in the movie is a rebel, it's Mrs. Robinson, so brilliantly depicted by Anne Bancroft. She's selfish and bitter but at least she has some depth, unlike Benjamin and Elaine who come across as completely shallow. Not to mention lacking in impulse control. But then aren't we all when we're young and in love? The Graduate was undeniably groundbreaking and it remains quite subversively funny during its first half. And, although the second half no longer possesses the romantic intensity it once had for me, now that I see the ending for what it really is, it has actually improved over time.

Katharine Ross and Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate

When I first saw The Graduate , I too saw it as a romantic comedy with a happy ending. Watching it now, I realize that the point of this film is not a love story at all but one of rebellion. Even more important is that, as Patrick wrote, the ending is anything but romantic.

Ben is under his parent’s control. The scuba scene not only represents his isolation but also his lack of freedom. They force him into the scuba gear and every time he comes to the surface, his father pushes him back down. It is after that scene that Ben decides to take Mrs. Robinson up on her offer to take his virginity.

The scene of Ben getting the room for his first tryst with Mrs. Robinson is humorous but by no means too much so. All through the process of his first time, he once again is under the instruction of someone older than himself. He nearly backs out until Mrs. Robinson manipulates him by calling him inadequate, and he must prove her wrong.

Ben is now getting sex at a regular rate but it does not seem to make him any happier. What it does do is to give him the confidence to stand up to his parents. Note the scene in the pool where his father asks him what he is doing and he responds, “Drifting…” Before, Ben would have done whatever his father wanted, but now he does not care so much. Sex allowed Ben to grow his balls.

Ben says he enjoys and looks forward to having sex with Mrs. Robinson but he never acts as if he does. He learns that Mrs. Robinson married her husband because she was pregnant with her daughter. More importantly, he learns that Mrs. Robinson thinks Ben is not good enough for her daughter. He promises not to date her, but Ben gets pushed into it anyway.

I do not believe that Ben falls head over heels in love with Elaine so much as he finally finds someone his own age to spend time with. Unlike everyone else around him, Elaine demands nothing of him. She takes what he can give, even going along to the strip club she obviously does not want to be in. After that one and only date, he decides to stalk her and determines that he is going to marry Elaine.

Ben journeys to Berkley and continues to spy on a girl who made no effort to contact him after discovering that he and her mother were fucking. What makes Ben think she has any interest in him, let alone want to marry him? Ben is a bit mentally off. They talk several times but during none of the conversations does she express her love for him. At best, she sends mixed messages, telling him, “I don’t want you to leave.” but answers his marriage proposal by stating she might, all the while being engaged to another man.

Elaine’s father visits Ben and tells him to leave Elaine alone. Her parents convince Elaine to marry her fiancé. He races to her home where he runs into Mrs. Robinson who states, “We have everything quite under control.” As an act of pure rebellion, Ben goes to the church on the day of the wedding and we see the confrontation that ends with Ben and Elaine escaping on the bus.

At no point in this film do I believe that Ben and Elaine are actually in love. Their relationship seems based more on acting out against what others want them to do than an actual well thought out decision. Notice how Elaine looks at her parents and her husband in the church before yelling for Ben. She is not so much running away with Ben as she is running away from her life. Look at their faces as they sit on the bus as if they are thinking, “Now what?” Their silence speaks volumes.

I agree with most of what Patrick wrote, except that Ben and Elaine are in fact rebels. The point of this film is that they were indirectly made rebels by their parents trying desperately to control them. The Graduate is a very dated movie in style and soundtrack, but its theme of generational disparity is timeless.

Like my brothers, I found that I got more out of this movie watching it now at the age of the grown-ups than I ever did when I was Ben and Elaine's age. For instance, how did I ever miss the fact that Mr. Robinson is gay?

Ben and Elaine are rebels in the sense that they rebel against their parents wishes, but it's a rather tame rebellion. Ben wants to marry Elaine, which is a fairly orthodox thing to do. They're a long way from the counterculture of the era. They're not looking to change the world, just find their place in it. In the 2007 sequel to the novel this film is based upon, Ben and Elaine are married and living in the suburbs of New York City, in a lifestyle not too far removed from the one their parents enjoyed.

I too don't believe that this young couple is truly in love. Ben is, as he says, drifting through life after college with no real purpose. Elaine suddenly gives him purpose. He will win her back and get her to marry him. It's a cause that suddenly motivates him to be proactive. It's the first decision that he makes on his own. It carries him right up until that final scene on the bus where you see on his face that now that he has what he set out to attain, he doesn't know what to do next. Elaine, on the other hand, is caught up in the romance of the moment. Carl, her fiancee, is shown to be a pipe smoking stuffed shirt that her parents want her to marry. His marriage proposal consists of the phrase, "We'd make a pretty good team." Compared to that, Ben, with his obsessive behavior and declarations of love, seems excitingly romantic.

Of the acting, Anne Bancroft is the stand-out. She brings depth, subtlety, and a melancholy sadness to the part that goes far beyond what is in the script. Her part is now iconic as the prototype for all future screen cougars. For some reason she was nominated for Best Actress for this role instead of Supporting Actress and lost to Katharine Hepburn for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner . Perhaps the studio didn't want her competing with her co-star, Katharine Ross in that category, but in any case she deserved the award over both Katharines, and Supporting Actress winner Estelle Parsons who won for Bonnie and Clyde . Hoffman is good, but is best in the lighter, comic moments. Ross's nomination surprises me because her part isn't that big or demanding, but she is very cute, in a late 1960s style.

Eric mentioned that the soundtrack is dated, and it is, but it was groundbreaking in its day. The way it worked in popular songs, all by Simon and Garfunkel, into the story, has become standard practice in such films, but was new at the time. Although the method is still a little rough here, as in when they repeat "Scarborough Fair" three times in a row during Ben's stalking of Elaine. The soundtrack is particularly effective during the neatly edited together montage of Ben and Mrs. Robinson's affair.

I don't believe this film has improved over time, just that it takes a level of maturity that most of us don't have at a young age to appreciate it. As Eric wrote, its themes are timeless.

Photos © Copyright Embassy Pictures (1967)

The Graduate

Blu-ray edition reviewed by Chris Galloway
February 21 2016

See more details, packaging, or compare

One of the most beloved American films of all time, The Graduate earned Mike Nichols a best director Oscar, brought the music of Simon & Garfunkel to a wider audience, and introduced the world to a young actor named Dustin Hoffman. Benjamin Braddock (Hoffman) has just finished college and is already lost in a sea of confusion and barely contained angst when he becomes sexually involved with a friend of his parents’, the indomitable Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), before turning his attention to her college-age daughter (Katharine Ross). Visually imaginative and impeccably acted, with a clever, endlessly quotable script by Buck Henry (based on the novel by Charles Webb), The Graduate had the kind of cultural impact that comes along only once in a generation.

Picture 9/10

Extras 9/10

You Might Like

Meantime (Blu-ray)

Tootsie (Blu-ray)

Secrets & Lies (Blu-ray)

International edition
Australia edition
Europe edition

Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft star in The Graduate, directed by Mike Nichols.

Review of Mike Nichols' The Graduate, 1968 - making fun of a young man's fancy

Though not as exciting as its reputation suggests, director Mike Nichols nevertheless shows his brilliance with The Graduate

Mike Nichols, director of The Graduate, dies at 83

M aybe I’m just cynical, or maybe I’ve simply watched too many of those wicked European films. Anyhow, I fail to see how The Graduate qualifies as the exciting new experience it has been cracked up to be. Basically, it operates as a giant confidence trick, with flash shots of discreet nudity to suggest Rabelaisian frankness, a handful of irrelevant protest songs to turn it into a symbol of student revolt, and some lush Lelouch-style photography to give it all a disarming wrapper.

Behind the cunning packaging, this story of a virginal young man (Dustin Hoffman) and his initiation into the mysteries of sex by a rapacious older woman (Anne Bancroft) is as old as the history of Hollywood sex comedy and the days when a callow Cary Grant accepted the invitation to come up and see Mae West sometime. And for all its air of uninhibited insolence, it ends with the triumph of true love: admittedly the hero abducts his beloved after her wedding to another man, but as the blissful pair rush off hand-in-hand, this is so obviously the real thing that even middlebrow sensibilities cannot possibly be offended.

This said, however, The Graduate is very, very funny, with Mike Nichols making brilliant use of his sharp eye and ear for absurdity to pin down the state of absolute non-communication which exists as the graduate returns home wondering what to do with his life, and his family confidently sits back waiting for him to opt for success. ‘Young man, I have one word for you,’ says a family friend with the air of imparting the ultimate mystery, ‘Plastics!’ What else can a bemused young man do but sit in his bedroom, gloomily contemplating an aquarium, when words - stretched and deformed by an assortment of pregnant pauses and meaningful stares - drop like so many stones to the bottom of the conversational sea?

He isn’t much happier when it comes to having an affair with the single-minded Mrs Robinson, who virtually dragoons him into bed and turns a deaf ear when he subsequently climbs out again with a pathetic cry of ‘Do you think we could just say a few words to each other first this time?’ The agonising experience of a first affair is hilariously exact - wanting to go to a movie instead, booking a hotel room for the first time, clumsily planting a kiss when the lady has just inhaled a mouthful of smoke - and somehow summed up in all its pathetic inadequacy by the fact that he never calls her anything but ‘Mrs Robinson,’ even in bed.

Dustin Hoffman, with Feiffer face and spaniel eyes, and Anne Bancroft, febrile and alarming, play these scenes to perfection, exactly as Mike Nichols and Elaine May might have done them once upon a time. It is when the graduate falls in love with Mrs Robinson’s daughter (Katharine Ross) that the film begins to trail downhill. Driven into outer darkness by Mrs Robinson, now become a screaming harpy, he moons about in despair while Christ symbols and hints of incest creep in, and the whole thing starts to wallow in pretension. Still, it isn’t often one gets even half a film as funny as this.

Mike Nichols
From the Guardian archive
Dustin Hoffman

More on this story

Mike Nichols made films about women – sadly a rarity in Hollywood

Why Working Girl offers the real deal

Here’s to you, Mike Nichols: tributes flow after death of Graduate director

Mike Nichols obituary

Mike Nichols remembered by Philip French: ‘A pleasure to work with and a delight to talk to’

Mike Nichols - a life in pictures

Mike Nichols: 10 of the best, from Virginia Woolf to Charlie Wilson

Comments (…), most viewed.

THE GRADUATE

"impetuous".

What You Need To Know:

Nominated for a 1967 Academy Award for Best Picture, THE GRADUATE depicts an honors graduate, Ben (Dustin Hoffman), who returns from college and is overwhelmed by his parentsí welcome home party. Eventually, the predatory Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) inveigles him into fornicating. Then, she prohibits him from dating her daughter, Elaine (Katherine Ross). Mr. Robinson spirits his daughter to a hastily arranged marriage. Ben arrives at the church and calls out her name, and Elaine turns to run toward him. Ben fights off the angry Robinsons, bolts the church doors with a large cross and elopes with Elaine.

(Ro, Pa, L, V, S, N, A, M, B, C) Romantic worldview with the pagan theme of an older woman seducing a younger man; 1 obscenity & 4 blasphemies; man fights off crowd of angry church folk; depicted and implied sex; upper female nudity & upper male nudity; people drink cocktails; smoking; and, some biblical & Christian elements.

More Detail:

Nominated for a 1967 Academy Award for Best Picture, THE GRADUATE depicts an innocent young honors graduate, Ben (Dustin Hoffman), who returns from college to his parentsí upper middle class home. He is distressed and undecided about his future, and wants to spend some time alone. An only child, Ben is overwhelmed by the fawning and pawing of his parentsí friends at their welcome home party, who ply him with questions about his future which he is unprepared to answer. One guest even takes him aside to give him one hilarious word of counsel: ìPlasticsî, which has become one of Hollywoodís most famous lines of dialogue.

He retires to his room for some time to collect his thoughts. Enter predatory Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), the estranged wife of Benís fatherís law partner, who inveigles him into driving her home and coming with her into her house, on the pretext that she is afraid of the dark. Cajoled by Mrs. Robinson into viewing her daughterís bedroom picture, Ben is further enticed as she disrobes in front of him and offers him sex. At first, he refuses, but later he invites her to a hotel, where he awkwardly takes a room, after a hilarious interchange with the hotel desk clerk. There, he and Mrs. Robinson have discreet sex.

Burdened with a guilt he cannot share regarding his carnal knowledge of his fatherís partnerís wife, who, in turn, prohibits him from dating her daughter, Elaine (Katherine Ross), Ben faces a dilemma when his parents pressure him to take Elaine out when she comes back on summer break from Cal-Berkeley. Under the hostile glare of her mother, who likewise cannot share her shameful secret, Ben escorts Elaine on an awkward date. He likes her, and she likes him. They agree to meet again. When he comes by on a rainy day to pick up Elaine once again, an enraged Mrs. Robinson threatens to tell Elaine about their affair. Fearing the sabotage of their nascent relationship. Ben tells her first, and she is revolted. He pursues her to Berkeley, where he catches up to her, as she goes to meet another man at the zoo.

Her father finds out about Benís affair with his wife, confronts him in Benís rooming house and spirits his daughter out of Benís reach for a hastily arranged marriage to the other man. Frantic, Ben importunes the other manís fraternity buddies for information as to the location of Elaineís wedding, and arrives at the Santa Barbara church just as the groom is about to kiss the bride. Positioning himself on the balcony window, Ben calls out her name, and Elaine turns to run toward him, away from her wedding party. Ben fights off the angrily cursing Robinsons, bolts shut the church doors with a large metal cross and elopes with his bride-to-be in a conveniently passing bus.

The fourth most profitable film of the 1960s, THE GRADUATE is a landmark movie. Morally, it exemplifies the 1960ís rebellion against the hypocritical values of the established, ìplastic,î materialistic, American culture, which paid lip service to religion, but lacked real integrity, or obedience to God. The outstanding musical score plays a crucial role as it underscores the futility of the vapid materialism of Benís parents, and their equally insipid materialistic friends, the Robinsons, whose marriage was patently devoid of love.

THE GRADUATE is also historic in that it represents one of the first films ever made after the Academy of Motion Pictures renounced the Motion Picture Code in 1966, a voluntary agreement by which the film studios had agreed to limit the prurience and violence of feature films from 1933 to 1966. In that era, an elder woman seducing a younger man was a scandal. In THE GRADUATE, Mrs. Robinson blatantly breaks her marriage vows to seduce the impressionable and relatively inexperienced young Ben. Her adultery was a scandal, according to 1960ís standards.

Although Mrs. Robinsonís adultery was punished by her husbandís decision to divorce her, Benís participation in the affair was never punished. Ben blithely graduates from fornicating with the mother to eloping with the daughter, with no consequences, except enduring the momentary wrath of Elaineís parents, who rage at him with futile curses from the bolted church glass window as he spirits Elaine away. So, the movie subtly transgresses the moral boundaries of the Motion Picture Code, since Benís adultery is implicitly justified because he is never punished for it.

Even so, this movie is delightful as cinematic art, the acting is superb and the music superlative. The 1997 colorized version looks the same as the 1967 movie, except for one scene at Cal-Berkeley.

In the movie, Dustin Hoffmanís character, Ben, exemplified the 1960ís moral drifter, who rebelled against the materialism of his parents to find true romantic love, but somehow evaded the deeper questions of lifeís true purposes.. Rebelling against hypocrisy is all well and good if it takes the path of the one true antidote to hypocritical materialism ( the way of the Cross.

Now more than ever we’re bombarded by darkness in media, movies, and TV. Movieguide® has fought back for almost 40 years, working within Hollywood to propel uplifting and positive content. We’re proud to say we’ve collaborated with some of the top industry players to influence and redeem entertainment for Jesus. Still, the most influential person in Hollywood is you. The viewer.

What you listen to, watch, and read has power. Movieguide® wants to give you the resources to empower the good and the beautiful. But we can’t do it alone. We need your support.

You can make a difference with as little as $7. It takes only a moment. If you can, consider supporting our ministry with a monthly gift. Thank you.

Movieguide® is a 501c3 and all donations are tax deductible.

#61: Graduate Hotels, Chip Rogers Resigns, Jobs Report, Spring Travel, and Mahomes/Kelce Restaurant

Podcast Episode

Add a plot in your language

User reviews

March 26, 2024 (United Kingdom)
See more company credits at IMDbPro

Technical specs

Runtime 16 minutes

More to explore

The 35 Best Movie Soundtracks of All Time

Posted: April 8, 2024 | Last updated: April 8, 2024

<p>A good soundtrack can make or break a film. Even a strong plot needs some music to set the mood. We compiled a list of the best movie soundtracks of all time. Where did your favorite land?</p>

A good soundtrack can make or break a film. Even a strong plot needs some music to set the mood. We compiled a list of the best movie soundtracks of all time. Where did your favorite land?

<p><strong>$9.49</strong></p><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002I1X2CC/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>The soundtrack for this 1998 teen comedy has a little bit of everything. Want some rap? There are tracks by Missy Elliott and Busta Rhymes. Rock more your speed? It also has Blink-182 and Guns N' Roses.</p><p><strong>More:</strong> <a href="https://www.bestproducts.com/lifestyle/g20882831/best-movies-of-2018/">These Are the Movies From 2018 You Must Watch</a></p>

Can't Hardly Wait

The soundtrack for this 1998 teen comedy has a little bit of everything. Want some rap? There are tracks by Missy Elliott and Busta Rhymes. Rock more your speed? It also has Blink-182 and Guns N' Roses.

More: These Are the Movies From 2018 You Must Watch

<p><strong>$9.99</strong></p><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00138D18Q/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>Tom Hanks wrote, directed, and co-stars in this 1996 film about a fictional band in the '60s called The Wonders. Listening to the soundtrack, you'd have no idea that the songs by The Wonders and other fake musicians weren't actual hits from that era.</p>

That Thing You Do!

Tom Hanks wrote, directed, and co-stars in this 1996 film about a fictional band in the '60s called The Wonders. Listening to the soundtrack, you'd have no idea that the songs by The Wonders and other fake musicians weren't actual hits from that era.

<p><strong>$9.49</strong></p><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002DQNKF6/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>It's the album that turned Seal's "Kiss from a Rose" into a hit. That's all you really need to know.</p>

Batman Forever

It's the album that turned Seal's "Kiss from a Rose" into a hit. That's all you really need to know.

<p><strong>$10.49</strong></p><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002NZVPUO/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>Here's a prime example of when the soundtrack is actually better than the movie. The Nicolas Cage/Meg Ryan romantic drama is forgettable, but hits like "Iris" by The Goo Goo Dolls and "Uninvited" by Alanis Morissette are forever in our hearts.</p>

City Of Angels

Here's a prime example of when the soundtrack is actually better than the movie. The Nicolas Cage/Meg Ryan romantic drama is forgettable, but hits like "Iris" by The Goo Goo Dolls and "Uninvited" by Alanis Morissette are forever in our hearts.

<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000TDGAJ8/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p><em>Romeo + Juliet</em> offers tracks by '90s staples Garbage, Everclear, The Cardigans, and more. Des'ree's "Kissing You" is the romantic theme song that made everyone root for Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio's doomed lovers.</p>

Romeo + Juliet Soundtrack

Romeo + Juliet offers tracks by '90s staples Garbage, Everclear, The Cardigans, and more. Des'ree's "Kissing You" is the romantic theme song that made everyone root for Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio's doomed lovers.

<p><strong>$9.99</strong></p><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0045DO82O/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>Letters to Cleo frontwoman Kay Hanley provided the singing voice for Josie McCoy, played by Rachael Leigh Cook. The result is an album of catchy pop-punk jams guaranteed to get stuck in your head. The songs by fictional boy band DuJour are also not to be skipped.</p>

Josie and the Pussycats

Letters to Cleo frontwoman Kay Hanley provided the singing voice for Josie McCoy, played by Rachael Leigh Cook. The result is an album of catchy pop-punk jams guaranteed to get stuck in your head. The songs by fictional boy band DuJour are also not to be skipped.

<p><strong>$7.99</strong></p><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L8B21NY/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>A must for any Neil Diamond fan, the soundtrack to this 1980 remake spawned three top-10 hits, including "America," "Love on the Rocks," and "Hello Again."</p>

The Jazz Singer

A must for any Neil Diamond fan, the soundtrack to this 1980 remake spawned three top-10 hits, including "America," "Love on the Rocks," and "Hello Again."

<p><strong>$9.99</strong></p><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001BKAGPC/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>A little Lisa Loeb goes a long way. Her hit "Stay (I Missed You)" with Nine Stories was everywhere after this movie came out and the rest of the soundtrack features songs from U2 and Lenny Kravitz, among others.</p>

Reality Bites

A little Lisa Loeb goes a long way. Her hit "Stay (I Missed You)" with Nine Stories was everywhere after this movie came out and the rest of the soundtrack features songs from U2 and Lenny Kravitz, among others.

<p><strong>$9.99</strong></p><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003Z8S3AS/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>Berlin's theme "Take My Breath Away" is just one of several quintessential tracks on this album. If you've never worked out while listening to "Danger Zone" by Kenny Loggins, you're not doing it right.</p>

Berlin's theme "Take My Breath Away" is just one of several quintessential tracks on this album. If you've never worked out while listening to "Danger Zone" by Kenny Loggins, you're not doing it right.

<p><strong>$10.99</strong></p><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00138F3B4/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>The soundtrack to Zach Braff's 2004 indie hit was as popular as the movie thanks to Natalie Portman's character declaring The Shins' "New Slang" to be life-changing. The album also includes songs by Iron & Wine, Coldplay, and Frou Frou.</p>

Garden State - Music From The Motion Picture

The soundtrack to Zach Braff's 2004 indie hit was as popular as the movie thanks to Natalie Portman's character declaring The Shins' "New Slang" to be life-changing. The album also includes songs by Iron & Wine, Coldplay, and Frou Frou.

<p><strong>$9.49</strong></p><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001NYCW7Q/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>Eminem's semi-autobiographical movie from 2002 gave us "Lose Yourself" along with tracks from Macy Gray, Jay-Z, and more. If you're into this one, be sure to check out <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074R22YKR/ref=sr_1_1_rd?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Patti Cake$</a> as well.</p>

8 Mile (Explicit Version)

Eminem's semi-autobiographical movie from 2002 gave us "Lose Yourself" along with tracks from Macy Gray, Jay-Z, and more. If you're into this one, be sure to check out Patti Cake$ as well.

<p><strong>$9.49</strong></p><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002OUV45E/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>Aimee Mann dominates the soundtrack to this 1999 film and she perfectly captures the mood of Paul Thomas Anderson's work. The album was certified gold (selling over 500,000 albums) and the track "Save Me" scored an Oscar nomination.</p>

Aimee Mann dominates the soundtrack to this 1999 film and she perfectly captures the mood of Paul Thomas Anderson's work. The album was certified gold (selling over 500,000 albums) and the track "Save Me" scored an Oscar nomination.

<p><strong>$9.49</strong></p><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002XGJHY4/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>A '90s teen comedy without a killer soundtrack? As if! </p>

A '90s teen comedy without a killer soundtrack? As if!

<p><strong>$9.49</strong></p><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H14BJX5/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>Come for Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise," and stay for the 11 other rap tracks that made this movie such a phenomenon in 1995.</p>

Dangerous Minds

Come for Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise," and stay for the 11 other rap tracks that made this movie such a phenomenon in 1995.

<p><strong>$10.49</strong></p><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H1TCTV4/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>This one is a necessity for all classic rock lovers. The songs make you want to get out and ride on the open road, which is pretty much exactly what the movie is about. Mission accomplished! </p>

Easy Rider (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

This one is a necessity for all classic rock lovers. The songs make you want to get out and ride on the open road, which is pretty much exactly what the movie is about. Mission accomplished!

<p><strong>$20.49</strong></p><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000002G3W/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>A movie about working in a music store (remember those?) obviously requires a worthy soundtrack. Rex Manning is nowhere to be found.</p>

Empire Records

A movie about working in a music store (remember those?) obviously requires a worthy soundtrack. Rex Manning is nowhere to be found.

<p><strong>$9.99</strong></p><p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00136NYNU?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>So many divas on one album. Whitney, Aretha, Mary, Toni... just to name a few. Every track was written and produced by Babyface. There's not a dud in the bunch.</p>

Waiting to Exhale

So many divas on one album. Whitney, Aretha, Mary, Toni... just to name a few. Every track was written and produced by Babyface. There's not a dud in the bunch.

<p><strong>$9.49</strong></p><p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00122LUXQ?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>Curtis Mayfield's 1972 soundtrack to the blaxploitation film is a soul/funk classic. The album was so popular, it made more money than the film.</p>

Curtis Mayfield's 1972 soundtrack to the blaxploitation film is a soul/funk classic. The album was so popular, it made more money than the film.

<p><strong>$9.49</strong></p><p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003SAGU3A?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>This 1993 comedy offers a collection of '70s rock that's so jam-packed, they split it into <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Even-Dazed-Confused-Various-artists/dp/B074CWKH5J/ref=sr_1_3_twi_mus_1?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">two volumes</a>. No disco balls here.</p>

Dazed and Confused

This 1993 comedy offers a collection of '70s rock that's so jam-packed, they split it into two volumes . No disco balls here.

<p><strong>$10.99</strong></p><p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00138EV8U?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>If you've seen the movie, you probably tried "the lift" while listening to "(I've Had) The Time of My Life." </p><p>Bonus: Patrick Swayze isn't just one of the stars of the movie — he also contributed "She's Like the Wind" to the soundtrack. </p>

Dirty Dancing

If you've seen the movie, you probably tried "the lift" while listening to "(I've Had) The Time of My Life."

Bonus: Patrick Swayze isn't just one of the stars of the movie — he also contributed "She's Like the Wind" to the soundtrack.

<p><strong>$29.98</strong></p><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FW66M68/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>So many hits from the ‘60s packed into one movie. Joan Baez, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Elvis … they were introduced to a new generation through this Best Picture winner. </p>

Forrest Gump: The Soundtrack (2 CDs)

So many hits from the ‘60s packed into one movie. Joan Baez, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Elvis … they were introduced to a new generation through this Best Picture winner.

<p><strong>$9.49</strong></p><p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FNWZ1C6?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>T Bone Burnett put together a mix of bluegrass, country, gospel, blues, and folk for the soundtrack to his 2000 film from the Coen Brothers. It was clearly the recipe for success, considering the album went platinum eight times over.</p>

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

T Bone Burnett put together a mix of bluegrass, country, gospel, blues, and folk for the soundtrack to his 2000 film from the Coen Brothers. It was clearly the recipe for success, considering the album went platinum eight times over.

<p><strong>$9.49</strong></p><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B07HRCT1PR/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>This early-'60s nostalgia film released in 1973 features songs by popular doo-wop and rock artists including Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. It's everything a baby boomer could ever want.</p>

American Graffiti

This early-'60s nostalgia film released in 1973 features songs by popular doo-wop and rock artists including Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. It's everything a baby boomer could ever want.

<p><strong>$9.49</strong></p><p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M4P9XD5?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>Yes, the soundtrack for a movie starring Looney Tunes characters <em>is</em> <em>that</em> good. Why didn't the Quad City DJs ever do more?</p>

Yes, the soundtrack for a movie starring Looney Tunes characters is that good. Why didn't the Quad City DJs ever do more?

<p><strong>$19.66</strong></p><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GJ7RORU/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>Obviously.</p>

Black Panther

Kendrick Lamar curated the songs that helped propel this film from just another entry in the Marvel cinematic universe to one of the best. Wakanda forever (and ever!).

<p><strong>$9.99</strong></p><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003YNT2R2/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>The title track by Kenny Loggins is a toe-tapper for sure, but Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out For a Hero" and "Let's Hear It for the Boy" by Deniece Williams take this album to the next level.</p>

The title track by Kenny Loggins is a toe-tapper for sure, but Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out For a Hero" and "Let's Hear It for the Boy" by Deniece Williams take this album to the next level.

<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H16TRBD/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>Motown made a comeback after the release of this 1983 film about a group of friends who reunite to mourn the death of one of their own. They reminisce about their lives set to the music of Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, and more.</p>

The Big Chill

Motown made a comeback after the release of this 1983 film about a group of friends who reunite to mourn the death of one of their own. They reminisce about their lives set to the music of Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, and more.

<p><strong>$12.49</strong></p><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CIU3IVS/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>Beyoncé and Fergie may not have been around during the Jazz Age, but this concept album works somehow. Bey's cover of Amy Winehouse's "Back to Black" and Lana Del Rey's "Young and Beautiful" is all the convincing you'll need.</p>

Music From Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby

Beyoncé and Fergie may not have been around during the Jazz Age, but this concept album works somehow. Bey's cover of Amy Winehouse's "Back to Black" and Lana Del Rey's "Young and Beautiful" is all the convincing you'll need.

<p><strong>$10.49</strong></p><p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0011Z51QG?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>It's Prince. No explanation needed. </p>

Purple Rain

It's Prince. No explanation needed.

<p><strong>$9.49</strong></p><p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075G46RM1?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>Disco might be dead now, but there's no denying the magic of the Bee Gees. </p>

Saturday Night Fever

Disco might be dead now, but there's no denying the magic of the Bee Gees.

<p><strong>$14.49</strong></p><p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07GWJMW22?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>It may not be the first time this story has been done, but Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper make sweet music together. </p>

A Star Is Born

It may not be the first time this story has been done, but Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper make sweet music together.

<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002IY5DL2/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>Here’s to Mrs. Robinson and to the rest of this Simon & Garfunkel album. This one sets the bar for full soundtracks performed by a single artist.</p>

The Graduate

Here’s to Mrs. Robinson and to the rest of this Simon & Garfunkel album. This one sets the bar for full soundtracks performed by a single artist.

<p><strong>$9.99</strong></p><p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0040GUIAC?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>There’s a reason this is the best-selling movie soundtrack of all time. That reason is the unparalleled voice of Whitney Houston. Even if you haven’t seen the movie, listening to “I Will Always Love You” or “I Have Nothing” will reduce you to tears.</p>

The Bodyguard

There’s a reason this is the best-selling movie soundtrack of all time. That reason is the unparalleled voice of Whitney Houston. Even if you haven’t seen the movie, listening to “I Will Always Love You” or “I Have Nothing” will reduce you to tears.

<p><strong>$12.08</strong></p><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000002OTL/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10050.g.46989216%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Shop Now</a></p><p>Quentin Tarantino takes his soundtracks as seriously as he does his filmmaking. This album is just as much of a ‘90s staple as the film with tracks including Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man” and Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell.” </p><p>These were popular songs long before the film ever came out, and yet it’s impossible not to think of it whenever they’re played. </p>

Pulp Fiction: Music From The Motion Picture (CD)

Quentin Tarantino takes his soundtracks as seriously as he does his filmmaking. This album is just as much of a ‘90s staple as the film with tracks including Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man” and Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell.”

These were popular songs long before the film ever came out, and yet it’s impossible not to think of it whenever they’re played.

More for You

White House responds after Pope Francis condemns 'gender theory,' affirms Biden's support for trans community

Amanda Knox faces another new trial in Italy

Jelly Roll performs as the top 24 perform on Season 22, Episode 9, of

'American Idol' recap: Jelly Roll cries as he grieves with teen contestant Mia Matthews

Space Rock Slammed Into Moon - The Explosion Was Seen From Japan

Doctor shares what happens to our bodies moments before we die

19 American foods that have been banned in other countries

19 American Foods that Are Not Allowed in Other Countries

A Florida woman spotted an alligator in her home after it crawled through her door.

Florida woman shocked to find large alligator crawling through her home: 'I was shaking'

Nigel Blythe-Tinker went missing while on board the luxury cruise ship Seven Seas Mariner

Top lawyer falls from cabin balcony into sea on luxury cruise

9-1-1 actor condemns homophobic backlash to character’s gay kiss

7 CDs You Probably Owned, Threw Out and Now Are Worth Bank

Jon Stewart says the Arab states won't give Palestinians citizenship because they're really terrified of the 'Islamists' they backed

A photo released by the Federal Public Defender shows inmate Brian Dorsey at the Potosi Correctional Center in Washington County, Mo. (Jeremy Weis, Federal Public Defender/AP)

Governor denies 70 prison staffers’ pleas to halt Brian Dorsey execution

Say Goodbye To Popcorn Ceilings Without Removing Them Thanks To This DIY

SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE -- Episode 1860 -- Pictured: Host Kristen Wiig during Promos on Tuesday, April 2, 2024 -- (Photo by: Rosalind O'Connor/NBC via Getty Images) (Photo: NBC via Getty Images)

Kristen Wiig Kills It In ‘SNL’ Sketch That Turns Popular Workout Into A Horror Movie

The babies were born on March 21, just six months after their parents were first introduced.

Adorable but Deadly Fluff Balls, Better Known as Pygmy Slow Lorises, Born at the Smithsonian's National Zoo

Texas Solar Eclipse Festival Canceled Hours Before Showtime

Gladiator 2’s official title announced as first poster is spotted in Las Vegas

L-R: Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Dolton Mayor Tiffany Henyard.

Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot hired to investigate so-called 'worst mayor in America' at $400 an hour

The Common Household Ingredient That Can Unclog Slow-Draining Sinks And Tubs

18 Old-School Dinners That We Want to Bring Back

REVIEW: BU On Broadway’s ‘Anastasia’ is a dazzling ‘journey to the past’

“Dancing bears, painted wings, things I almost remember, and a song someone sings, once upon a December …”

The nostalgic lyrics and twinkling orchestral accompaniment of “Once Upon a December” instantly transport audience members at “Anastasia” into early 20th century St. Petersburg, Russia — a magical world of music boxes and lavish balls. Yet, for both the audience and the protagonist, the sentimental elegance of this world will soon be shattered.

Boston University On Broadway performed the musical “Anastasia” from Thursday through Saturday at the Tsai Performance Center.

Based on the 1997 animated film, the production featured songs from the film as well as a large selection of original compositions.

Set in Russia in the years after the Bolshevik Revolution, “Anastasia” is loosely based on the legend of the Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna. She is believed by some to have been the lone survivor of the Romanov family’s brutal execution by Bolshevik revolutionaries.

Following the musical’s prologue 20 years later, Anastasia is now Anya, a poor young woman working as a street-sweeper in Leningrad, formerly known as St. Petersburg. Although she suffers from amnesia that leaves her with few memories of her past, Anya is determined to reunite with her family in Paris.

Lauren SanFanAndre, a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences, is perfectly cast as the titular Anastasia. She is able to simultaneously embody the character’s plucky strength and infectious energy, as well as her self-doubt and anxiety about her identity.

SanFanAndre has the voice of a Disney princess: clear, bright and sweet, yet powerful. She expertly delivers every song, especially the show-stopping “Journey to the Past” which closes the musical’s first act.

As Dmitry, a sly and charming con-artist, Kai Farr lights up the stage within the first few seconds of his performance. Farr, a junior in the College of Communication, has a soaring tenor range best displayed in “My Petersburg,” in which he recounts his childhood as an orphan.

Unfortunately, technical difficulties with the microphones occasionally hindered the audience’s ability to appreciate the two lead singers’ talents. Nevertheless, the cast members handled the sound issues like professionals. The show must go on, and so it did.

In his duplicitous pursuits, Dmitry is accompanied by Vlad Popov, an older former member of the Bolshevik imperial court who is played by Daniel Ulrich, a sophomore in the College of Engineering.

In hopes of receiving a hefty monetary reward from the Dowager Empress, Dmitry and Vlad concoct a Pygmalion-esque scheme to teach a young woman to impersonate the lost Anastasia, and quickly pick Anya to be their imposter Romanov. As Anya practices inhabiting the role of the patrician aristocrat, she and Dmitry begin to open up to each other, and eventually fall in love.

However, every story must have its antagonist. For Anya —and the people of Leningrad — it is Gleb, a Bolshevik general who is obsessed with her. Christian Hoffmeister, a sophomore in ENG, uses his strong stage presence and baritone voice to deeply portray the character’s inner turmoil and conflict.

At times, the group dance numbers could become muddled and messy when the choreography leaned toward over-ambitiousness. Still, the chorus made up for with its strong singing, which propelled the musical forward through both upbeat and somber moments.

Throughout its two hour, 30 minute runtime, “Anastasia” is able to tip-toe between moments of touching emotion and humorous levity.

“Stay, I Pray You,” one of the musical’s most emotionally moving songs, is heartbreaking in its quiet simplicity. Count Ipolitov, played by Jozef Janak, a sophomore in Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, leads the crowd of Russians in a prayer to their homeland before they board the train to Paris, leaving their past behind forever.

On the humorous side, a personal favorite is “The Countess and the Common Man,” performed by Vlad and Countess Lily, a former fling and the Dowager Countess’s lady-in-waiting.

The pair’s chemistry and physical comedy skills are impeccable, elevating an already funny tune into a laugh-out-loud duet. The song also gives Maia Penzer, a sophomore in COM, an opportunity to show off her powerhouse vocals as Countess Lily.

When Anya and her grandmother, the Dowager Empress played by Sophie Sampliner, finally reunite in the show’s final scenes, it is a moment of catharsis. Sampliner, a freshman in CAS, imbues the Dowager Empress with the regal poise and maturity necessary to be believable as an elderly former aristocrat.

As the chorus sings a rousing reprise of “Once Upon a December,” Anya and Dmitry — finally freed from the constant cycle of rumors and gossip — leave Paris to begin a new life together.

The words that Anya sang in “Journey to the Past,” before her trip to Paris, still ring true.

“One step at a time, one hope, then another, who knows where this road may go?”

Maia Penzer is a lifestyle associate editor. She was not involved in the writing or editing of this article.

Features Co-Editor Siena Griffin is the assistant tech director of Anastasia at BU On Broadway. She was not involved in the reporting or editing of this article.

Get BU's headlines delivered straight to your inbox.

Send in a tip.

Send tips about issues you want covered to [email protected]

Support independent student journalism by donating to the FreeP here !

There is nothing fishy about a ‘stupid’ hobby

Imposter syndrome | doctor’s orders, florida man yaps about florida | con-current events, campus crime logs: march 31 — april 6, men’s basketball looks back on rollercoaster season, postseason experience for young roster, readership survey, the daily free press.

Advertising
Terms of Use
Join Our Staff!
Board of Directors

IMAGES

The Graduate movie review & film summary (1967)
Movie Review: The Graduate (1967)
The Graduate wiki, synopsis, reviews, watch and download
The Graduate movie review & film summary (1967)
The Graduate (1967) Movie Review
‘The Graduate’ Review: Movie (1967)

COMMENTS

The Graduate movie review & film summary (1967)
The Graduate. "The Graduate," the funniest American comedy of the year, is inspired by the free spirit which the young British directors have brought into their movies. It is funny, not because of sight gags and punch lines and other tired rubbish, but because it has a point of view. That is to say, it is against something.
The Graduate
David Nusair Reel Film Reviews Full Review … Mike Massie ... Audience Reviews for The Graduate. Mar 23, 2016.
The Graduate movie review & film summary (1967)
Advertisement. "The Graduate,'' released in 1967, contains no flower children, no hippies, no dope, no rock music, no political manifestos and no danger. It is a movie about a tiresome bore and his well-meaning parents. The only character in the movie who is alive--who can see through situations, understand motives, and dare to seek her own ...
The Graduate review
I f ever a movie captured the audience's imagination with its musical soundtrack, it was The Graduate, that irresistibly watchable 1967 classic, now rereleased in cinemas, starring Anne Bancroft ...
'The Graduate' Review: Movie (1967)
On Dec. 21, 1967, Mike Nichols unveiled The Graduate in theaters, launching the career of Dustin Hoffman. The film was nominated for seven Oscars at the 40th Academy Awards, and won one in the ...
The Graduate
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 ...
'The Graduate' Review: Dustin Hoffman Stars in Delightful Comedy
Film Review: 'The Graduate'. " The Graduate " is a delightful, satirical comedy-drama about a young man's seduction by an older woman, and the measure of maturity which he attains from ...
The Graduate (1967)
Instant_Palmer 29 September 2017. 'The Graduate' is THE best movie comedy of all-time, ranking #1 on my IMDb "Top 10 Greatest Comedies List". The film is culturally significant and a flawless work of cinematic art. The film propelled director Mike Nichols and actor Dustin Hoffman to the top of the Hollywood A-List.
The Graduate (1967)
The Graduate: Directed by Mike Nichols. With Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Katharine Ross, William Daniels. A disillusioned college graduate finds himself torn between his older lover and her daughter.
The Graduate
Verified Audience. Jacob Brackman New Yorker. TOP CRITIC. The Graduate engages its audience almost exclusively at the level of events until the grandly satisfying conclusion, when its problems ...
When 'The Graduate' Opened 50 Years Ago, It Changed Hollywood (and
The Graduate won an Oscar, for Nichols' direction, though critical reaction was vehemently mixed. However, a retrospective viewing by Roger Ebert shows that the film is rich enough to be read ...
The Graduate Movie Review
This way of leaving a film open-ended and unsettled, above all else, influenced many of the cinematic treasures of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period that most look back on as golden days of motion-picture history. Much has been said about the success and aftershocks of the release of The Graduate in 1967. Certainly its deadpan humor and ...
The Graduate
Best-EVER Soundtrack Sync. #1 Greatest Comedy 'The Graduate' is THE best movie comedy of all-time, ranking #1 on my IMDb "Top 10 Greatest Comedies List". The film is culturally significant and a flawless work of cinematic art. ... The Graduate is a flawlessly acted and produced film. [Review of re-release] Read More By Ethan Alter FULL REVIEW. 90.
Why Do We Love "The Graduate"?
Two or three reviewers greeted it with mild enthusiasm; the rest, even hard-to-please critics, were wild about it. Stanley Kauffmann wrote in the New Republic, " 'The Graduate' gives some ...
The Graduate 50 Years After Its Oscar Win
New material will be added to that page through the end of 2018. In 1968, The Graduate was nominated for seven Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best ...
The Graduate Review: As Seductive as Ever
The Graduate Review: As Seductive as Ever. Harry Solomons. March 22, 2022. Now as iconic as any great of the 1960s, The Graduate remains, by far, the most joyful treatise on the divide between the American young and old. We first see Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman, in his first truly star-making role) in transit; this title figure of The ...
The Graduate
The Graduate also launched the career of Dustin Hoffman who would go on to be one of the great male movie stars of the latter half of the 20th Century. Based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Charles Webb, this is the story of Benjamin Braddock, the titular scholar.
The Graduate Review :: Criterion Forum
Picture 9/10. Mike Nichols' seminal film The Graduate receives a surprise release on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection, who presents the film on a dual-layer disc in its original theatrical aspect ratio of about 2.35:1. The new 1080p/24hz high-definition presentation has been taken from a new 4K scan of the original negative.
Here's to you, Mrs Robinson: why The Graduate unites warring
The film that summed it all up was The Graduate, released in the US in December 1967, starring Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock, a despondent 20-year-old who moves back home after finishing ...
The Graduate (1967): Movie Review
Film and Furniture. "The Graduate" follows Benjamin Braddock, a 20-year-old boy (or "man" as his father says), who has just recently graduated college after an impressive and decorated four years at school. The pressures of life and societal expectations silently crush him to the point that even interacting with his parents' friends ...
Review of Mike Nichols' The Graduate, 1968
The Graduate is a 1968 comedy-drama film directed by Mike Nichols, starring Dustin Hoffman as a disillusioned college graduate who is seduced by an older woman and falls in love with her daughter ...
The Graduate (1967) Movie Review
Movie House Memories - Episode 117The Graduate (1967)Starring: #DustinHoffman, #AnneBancroft, #KatharineRossDirector: #MikeNichols Contents of This Review0:0...
THE GRADUATE
THE GRADUATE is a landmark movie, exemplifying the 1960ís rebellion against the hypocritical values of the ìplasticî American culture, which paid lip service to religion, but lacked integrity. The outstanding musical score underscores the vapid materialism of Benís parents. This movie is delightful as cinematic art, the acting is superb and ...
#61: Graduate Hotels, Chip Rogers Resigns, Jobs Report, Spring ...
IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. Find ratings and reviews for the newest movie and TV shows. Get personalized recommendations, and learn where to watch across hundreds of streaming providers.
The 35 Best Movie Soundtracks of All Time
A good soundtrack can make or break a film. Even a strong plot needs some music to set the mood. We compiled a list of the best movie soundtracks of all time. Where did your favorite land? $9.49 ...
REVIEW: BU On Broadway's 'Anastasia' is a dazzling 'journey to the past
Based on the 1997 animated film, the production featured songs from the film as well as a large selection of original compositions. Set in Russia in the years after the Bolshevik Revolution, "Anastasia" is loosely based on the legend of the Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna.

Movie Reviews

Roger Ebert

Now playing

Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in Two Pieces

Sleeping Dogs

In the Land of Saints and Sinners

The Greatest Hits

Amelia’s Children

Film Credits

The Graduate (1967)

Directed by

From a screenplay by

Screenplay by

Ape Shall Not Kill Ape: A Look at the Entire Apes Franchise

​Criterion Celebrates the Films That Forever Shifted Our Perception of Kristen Stewart​

The Estate of George Carlin Destroys AI George Carlin in Victory for Copyright Protection (and Basic Decency)

The Future of the Movies, Part 3: Fathom Events CEO Ray Nutt

Film Review: ‘The Graduate’

A.D. Murphy

More From Our Brands

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Email not verified

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

Movies / TV

The Graduate Reviews

ARTS & CULTURE

The Graduate

The Ascent of Ma’am

Harold and Maude (1971)

Animal House (1978)

Class (1983)

Bull Durham (1988)

American Pie (1999)

How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998)

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993)

Thelma & Louise (1991)

Tadpole (2000)

Kathleen Cleary Jane Seymour in Wedding Crashers (2005) Treasury secretary’s wife stalks her daughter’s suitor.

The Boy Next Door (2015)

Home Again (2017)

Or browse by category:

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

Common Sense Selections for Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

YouTube Kids Channels for Gamers

Explaining the News to Our Kids

Celebrating Black History Month

Movies and TV Shows with Arab Leads

Celebrate Hip-Hop's 50th Anniversary

A Lot or a Little?

Positive Messages

Positive Role Models

Violence & Scariness

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Products & Purchases

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Parents Need to Know

Where to Watch

Community Reviews

Classical Film: Best Viewed Age 16+

Is It Any Good?

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Movie Details

Did we miss something on diversity?

Suggest an Update

Harold and Maude

Indie Films

Why Do We Love “The Graduate”?

New Yorker Favorites

Criterion Celebrates the Films That Forever Shifted Our Perception of Kristen Stewart