The album also featured six soundtrack compositions that appeared in the film by composer David Grusin. Grusin was uncredited on the album cover, although the album label does read "Additional Music by David Grusin."

In October 2001, The Graduate was selected as the seventh best movie soundtrack album of all time by Entertainment Weekly magazine: "Rock & roll had seeped into movies by 1967, but most of those films were concert flicks or Elvis embarrassments. All that changed with Mike Nichols' gently satiric swipe at the establishment and the emerging counterculture. Nichols' use of old and new Simon and Garfunkel songs was ingenious: Cue 'The Sound of Silence' as Benjamin rides a moving walkway to his uncertain future or 'Scarborough Fair' as his romantic dreams crumble. Even though half of it is devoted to a mood-music score, this landmark introduced 'youth music' to grown-ups' movies, the reverberations of which are still being felt."

TRACK LISTING

SIDE 1

1. "Sounds Of Silence" - Simon And Garfunkel (Simon)*
2. "The Singleman Party Foxtrot" - David Grusin (Grusin)**
3. "Mrs. Robinson" (Version 1 as heard in the film) - Simon And Garfunkel (Simon)*
4. "Sunporch Cha-Cha-Cha" - David Grusin (Grusin)**
5. "Scarborough Fair/Canticle (Interlude)" - Simon And Garfunkel (Garfunkel/Simon)*
6. "On The Strip" - David Grusin (Grusin)**
7. "April Come She Will" - Simon And Garfunkel (Simon)*
8. "The Folks" - David Grusin (Grusin)**

SIDE 2

1. "Scarborough Fair/Canticle - Simon And Garfunkel (Garfunkel/Simon)*
2. "A Great Effect" - David Grusin (Grusin)*
3. "The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine" - Simon And Garfunkel (Simon)*
4. "Whew" - David Grusin (Grusin)**
5. "Mrs. Robinson" (Version 2 as heard in the film) - Simon And Garfunkel (Simon)*
6. "The Sound Of Silence" - Simon And Garfunkel (Simon)*

*Charing Cross Music (BMI)
**Joseph E. Levine Music Corp. (ASCAP)

NOTES

Date: February 1968
Genre: ROCK

CREDITS

Performers
Art Garfunkel: Vocals
Paul Simon: Guitar, Vocals

Production Credits
Simon & Garfunkel: Main Performer, Performer
David Grusin: Performer
Teo Macero: Producer
Ray Moore: Editing Engineer
Charles Burr: Liner Notes

LINER NOTES

What is so downright perplexing is that the young now seem so much more severely serious than the old. Even so much more conservative in a special sense -- the sense of honoring and cherishing the very best that's in them -- like sincerity, openness, honesty and love. While the middle-aged so often express cynicism and self disappointment.

There is, sadly, perhaps something very American about all this. Americans have always had a certain knack of being young. We know how. Up to a point. Then, the older we get chronologically, the greater and more apparent becomes the difference between our ages and our maturity. Emotional maturity in the average American adult -- so says the joke -- arrives at age 29. And lasts for an hour and twenty-seven minutes.

And so Ben, a young college graduate (DUSTIN HOFFMAN), returns to his posh California home considerably disturbed about "his future." What adult -- that he can see around him -- represents anything worth emulating? Honors came easy in college -- both athletic and academic. But now these mean nothing. Where does he go from here?

The first instinct of his parents is to exploit him -- here called "having a party in his honor." Hail the conquering and altogether aimless hero. Lots of booze. Lots of talk. Lots of congratulations for young Ben.

An excuse to escape the party comes to hand. Mrs. Robinson (ANNE BANCROFT) wants Ben to drive her home. He does. Then Mrs. Robinson comes to hand.

Ben is shocked and scared. The Robinsons are great friends of the family. Such things are wrong. Aren't they?

Mrs. Robinson is patient but very unimpressed with Ben's scruples. The Robinsons also have a daughter, Elaine (KATHARINE ROSS), whom Ben's parents hope he'll date. They insistently nag Ben and he is eventually forced to take her out. Not surprisingly, Elaine finds Ben very hostile toward her. He shows her such a cruelly rotten time that she cries and asks to be taken home.

Ben apologizes and blames his current anxiety and confusion for this compulsion to be rude. She forgives him. They ride around. They eat in the car. They talk. And Ben grows visibly happier by the minute.

But Mrs. Robinson -- Elaine's mother -- has two strong reasons to interfere: to "protect" her daughter, and to keep Ben for herself.

But now Ben -- for the first time -- knows what he wants. It's Elaine.

The rest of "The Graduate" details the tender, awful and extremely bumpy working out of this situation. It is often hilariously funny, often very painful, always incisive and engrossing.

"Funny, outrageous and touching, 'The Graduate' is a sophisticated film that puts Mr. Nichols and his associates on a level with any of the best satirists working abroad today." -- Bosley Crowther, N.Y. Times

MIKE NICHOLS -- with a superb record of achievement in Broadway theater -- undertook "The Graduate" as his second film assignment, first directing the screen version of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" As in all he has done, the sensitivity of his mind, eye and ear prove far superior to any merely imposed technique. His instinctive grasp of the logic of feeling has, in "The Graduate," made explicit to its audiences -- often in split seconds -- sensations and experiences that defy articulation in any other way. In this he has made brilliant use of the very remarkable gifts of many individuals, among them writers Calder Willingham and Buck Henry, director of cinematography Bob Surtees, film editor Sam O'Steen, and production designer Richard Sylbert. The skill of all is reflected in the fact that each moment of "The Graduate" gives the totally unified effect of the vision of one mind.

Each "appointment" along the way was crucial. The choices were so correct that, in retrospect, it is now all but impossible to imagine anyone but Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson, any other Ben than Dustin Hoffman, any Elaine but Katharine Ross. And this holds true throughout the rest of the marvelous cast.

And it holds true for the music.

SIMON AND GARFUNKEL express -- in this picture score and independently in their music -- those audible qualities of the young generation that have so far removed it from conventional American life as to create a recognized "gap."

One word for the special feeling in the Simon and Garfunkel songs in "The Graduate" might be "internal" -- that quality of seeming to come from the deep inside recesses of the mind. And this is the way their music has been used -- in the "hung up" moments of contemplation as Ben's life swings back and forth between hope and frustration.

In contrast, the more conventional music -- the tango in Mrs. Robinson's bar, the music of the strip joint and the cocktail lounge, the tea dance music in the hotel ballroom -- these pieces in the film represent that external, superficial and nervous world we live in and walk through almost without sensation; the sound effects of our adult society.

There is value and virtue in both, to be sure. But it is the inside life of the soul that this picture is about -- sincerities so deep they can only be whispered. And it is this that the young -- all people for whom it is not already "too late" -- are taking seriously.

- Charles Burr