The Graduate
1967

Directed by Mike Nichols (Academy Award winner). Screenplay by Calder Willingham & Buck Henry. Based on the novel by Charles Webb. Camera, Robert Surtees. Editor, Sam O'Steen. Music, David Grusin. Songs by Paul Simon and sung by Simon and Garfunkel: "Mrs. Robinson," "The Sound of Silence," "April Come She Will," and "Scarborough Fair." Produced by Lawrence Turman. Embassy. 105 min.

Mrs. Robinson Ben Braddock Elaine Robinson Mr. Braddock Mr. Robinson Mrs. Braddock Carl Smith Mr. Maguire Mr. McCleery Second lady Mrs. Singleman Room clerk Miss DeWitt Berkeley student

ANNE BANCROFT DUSTIN HOFFMAN KATHARINE ROSS WILLIAM DANIELS MURRAY HAMILTON ELIZABETH WILSON BRIAN AVERY WALTER BROOKE NORMAN FELL ELISABETH FRASER ALICE GHOSTLEY BUCK HENRY MARION LORNE RICHARD DREYFUSS

t a welcome-home party for a young man just out of college, a businessman sidles over, pulls him away and gives him some sage advice. "I just want to say one word to you... 'plastics.' There's a great future in plastics. Think about it."

This abbreviated formula for success comes from The Graduate, a film that drew hordes of young people to the movies in the 1960s. Older people followed to see what all the fuss was about.

The film's attraction was that it was saying something new -- or so it was perceived. It attempted, among other things, to point up the burgeoning generation gap, a phenomenon that was preoccupying the youth of that decade. And so the movie quickly became a symbol of youthful rebellion. More than that, it took some telling swipes at the grossness of the upper-middle-class adult world. It was a study of coming of age and of alienation, of frustration, and of empty values.

The picture was based on a novel by Charles Webb, who, ironically, claimed he never went to see the film. "I was afraid if I saw the movie, I would have a nervous breakdown," he said. Webb was twenty-one when he wrote the book, his first novel. He got only a flat $20,000 for the movie sale, then another $5,000 when it became a runaway success and made millions. However, Webb's luck wasn't all bad. The reissue of his novel in paperback made well over a million dollars.

Webb's book read more like a screenplay. Most of it was straight dialogue. There was no physical description of the main characters. But Webb had nothing to do with the script. And he made no bones about attributing the movie's success to Dustin Hoffman and Mike Nichols.

Nichols, who had then directed only one other movie, went far out on a limb by putting Hoffman in the lead. Hoffman was unknown, and his test was anything but impressive.

In that test, Nichols asked him to sit on a bed and play a love scene with Katharine Ross. Looking at Hoffman, Ross remembered, her spirits fell. She thought: "He looks about three feet tall, so dead serious, so unkempt. This is going to be a disaster."

It was. He was so awkward and out of synch in their verbal fencing match that at one point when she turned around, all he could do was grab her backside.

"But," Hoffman said, "Nichols, clever guy that he is, saw something in me that he could use. Panic, maybe?" What Nichols really perceived was that Hoffman was perfect in the part of a confused young man groping to find his place in a society that repelled him.

Nevertheless, Hoffman's uncomfortable feelings during the screen test did not vanish during the filming. "I kept acting like on stage. Nichols would say: 'Very good, now do it again.' So I would do what I thought was nothing. And it turned out to be enough."

Even though his performance made him a star, Hoffman thought the major credit for the movie's popularity should go to the director. "It's Nichols's picture, his victory, not mine. I look terrific up there -- nobody will ever take such care with lighting on me again -- but I don't have much feeling of personal accomplishment about it."

Part of that victory should go to the producer, Larry Turman. It was Turman who bought the rights to the little-known Webb novel, worked for a year to get the movie filmed, and hired Nichols. According to some accounts, it was also Turman who chose Hoffman.

A 1971 New York Times article said Turman picked Hoffman over Robert Redford for the title role. Turman said Redford made a screen test but was "too physically assured for the part. Redford gave a terrific test of a skillful, wonderful actor whose own qualities were totally wrong for the role. Dustin Hoffman was goony... All the others we tested were playing at being goony."

Yet, successful though the picture was, it was a flawed movie. It broke into two distinct parts: the first a comedy, the second a romance. Those who hailed the movie insisted the parts had a unity. They felt that Ben's love for Elaine transposed him from a comic fumbler to a romantic figure.

Even so, the film was stylistically unbalanced. Most of the early interest was focused on Ben's inept affair with Elaine's mother, Mrs. Robinson. The melodramatic second half, in which he frenetically pursues her daughter, seem incongruous, even jarring. But Nichols keeps things racing at such breakneck speed he gets away with it -- or almost.

Some film buffs were totally put off by the change of mood. The most colorfully phrased complaint came from a letter writer to the New York Times. "You can't change horses in midstream and expect this rider to keep up with you," said one William Herndon of New York City. "If I sit down to watch The Importance of Being Earnest, I don't expect the second-act curtain to reveal A Streetcar Named Desire.

Flawed or not, the film was a milestone of its era. For months, it was the prime topic of discussion at parties, no matter what the age group.

If you went to one of these gatherings and asked about the storyline, somebody might have told you something like this:

Ben Braddock, fresh from a successful college career in the East, returns to his upper-middle-class home in Los Angeles.

For all his credentials, Ben is really a kind of nebech, a harmless, inarticulate young man, confused about his values and the society he has been thrust into. At a homecoming cocktail party, he wanders about, flouncing from one fatuous group to another. "There's the award-winning scholar... We're all so proud of you... Proud. Proud. Proud... Here's the track star... What are you going to do now?"

The one relationship he makes is with Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), the neurotic wife of his father's partner. She lures Benjamin to her bedroom and casually disrobes while he looks on shocked, babbling moral platitudes.

But at their next meeting, he takes her to a hotel. What she sees in him remains a mystery. He keeps calling her Mrs. Robinson. He kisses her before she can exhale smoke from a cigarette. However, for better or worse, their affair begins.

Unlike most members of his sex, Benjamin tries to instill more meaning in their relationship than there is. Equally uncharacteristically, all Mrs. Robinson wants is a roll in the hay. "I don't think we have much to say to each other," she tells him.

Benjamin's mother and father begin to despair. When Benjamin isn't gone all night, he spends his time gazing in his tropical-fish aquarium or lounging on a raft in his backyard pool. His parents try to snap him out of his doldrums. Unaware of his true nocturnal activities, they arrange a date with Mrs. Robinson's daughter, Elaine, a former high school classmate.

Now the second part of the film starts. Benjamin falls hard for Elaine. "You're the first thing for so long that I like," he says. But their relationship is short-lived. When Mrs. Robinson finds her daughter is interested in Benjamin, she gives him an ultimatum: Either he leaves Elaine alone or she will tell her daughter everything.

Benjamin decides the best defense is a good offense. It turns out to be as costly a miscalculation as a blocked punt. When he confesses his affair with her mother, Elaine is outraged. She throws him out, goes back to college, and starts dating a medical student (Brian Avery).

Benjamin won't give up. He tracks down Elaine and follows her to class every day. In time, she finds she really does care for him. And after a while, she falls in love with Benjamin. But again their relationship is abbreviated. Her parents hear about it and whisk her away to the altar to marry her medical student.

Still undaunted, Benjamin storms the church just after the ceremony ends -- an interesting point because it avoids the cliché. In a scene many critics have said comes uncomfortably close to the wedding fray in Morgan (1966), Benjamin breaks the silence by shouting "Elaine!" The bride looks up, startled.

"It's too late," says her mother.

"Not for me," Elaine replies. Her mother slaps her face. It doesn't work. Elaine bolts away and Benjamin fends off the angered crowd with a cross he pulls down from the wall and swishes like a sword. Using the cross, Benjamin bars the church door. Then the two -- she in her wedding gown, he grubby and unshaven -- dash across the church lawn and ride off in a passing bus.

There is no fadeout embrace. Instead, the last scene shows them catching their breath in the back seat, oblivious to the stares of the other passengers.

Unquestionably, the wedding scene in the most-remembered sequence. It had the nerve to break the rules. It was an inspiration to the rebellious generation that was then picketing campuses and questioning Establishment morals.

But, ironically, Nichols intended the last scene to return Benjamin and Elaine to reality. "I think ten minutes after the bus leaves, the girl will say to him, 'My God, I have no clothes.' At least, they're out of the terrible world they lived in. But they are not to be envied. I think Benjamin will end up like his parents."

- David Zinman, Fifty Grand Movies of the 1960s and 1970s, 1986.