Film Chronicle

he Graduate, the best American movie of 1967, is running neck-and-neck with Bonnie and Clyde (second best) in the Most Analyzed U.S. Film of the Decade sweepstakes (the front runner is still Dr. Strangelove). The leading character, Ben, a young Californian who comes home after being All-Everything at college, looks too Jewish for some reviewers, and not athletic enough for others. The film is accused of switching emotional gears -- from coolly satiric in Part One, when Ben forms a lazy liaison with a woman twice his age, to gooily romantic in Part Two, when he falls in love with the woman's daughter, Elaine. And some consider the climax, during which Ben saves his beloved from her parental predators by swinging a crucifix, blasphemous. Mike Nichols, The Graduate's director, has responded to these jibes by characterizing critics as "eunuchs watching a gang-bang."

Applying this analogy to The Graduate, we find that Nichols, forcing his story upon us with a muscular cinematic technique plucked from taste-making directors, comes on like Ben at the end of the film. Here are some of the obvious influences on Nichols' style (in alphabetical order): Ingmar Bergman, Claude Chabrol, Fedrico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, Arthur Penn, Agnes Varda, and Orson Welles as Grand Tutor. If we ignore the gratuitous homage to most of the above cast, we discover that Nichols' use of deep-focus camera work to clarify and isolate the characters, his tendency to long takes and little camera movement, his mastery of blocking actors and directing dialogue, is similar to Welles' command of these factors in Citizen Kane, and we commend Nichols on his choice of mentor.

But most of the critics' reservations pertain to the "reality" of his characters; and here we can change Nichols' remark to "eunuchs watching an adroit seduction," for Nichols elicits sympathy for his protagonist by making Ben's environment unsympathetic. The reason Ben never trusts anyone over thirty may be that he never meets anyone under forty -- until Elaine comes along. Like two cellmates, they almost have to become friends. But Elaine can't be totally trusted either: she believes her mother, whom she must know to be a neurotic alcoholic, when told that the liaison was Ben's idea (the opposite is true), and considers getting married to both Ben and a blond cipher she knows at college.

Why, then, is The Graduate the best American movie of 1967? Well, it might be more apt to call it the most American movie of 1967, because its strengths and weaknesses are ours. It shows us the United States of the Sixties in the fond, exaggerated way the screwball comedies of the Thirties revealed their own era. Nichols' eclecticism, and his neglect of Charles Webb, whose novel furnished almost all of the film's dialogue, can be compared with the traits of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, two creators whose genius lay in consolidating the creations of others. We smile in recognition at each gesture of the excellent performers (Dustin Hoffman as Ben, Katharine Ross as Elaine, Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson) to express Ben's typically American moods: at the film's start, to help suggest the faceless man Ben is in danger of becoming; during the older woman's seduction, to show that this new game is really more of the same; and at the end. Ben has snatched Elaine from the sacrificial altar just in time. But now what? He's saved her from something bad but has nothing good to replace it with. Slowly the smiles fade from their faces. "Then," the song goes, "the vision that was planted in my brain still remains, within the sounds of silence."

- Richard Corliss, National Review, May 7, 1968.