The Graduate (1967)
Somehow not about crippling debt.
“I’m just [worried], I guess, about my future […] I want it to be different.” 1967’s The Graduate effectively captures a particular kind of post-college aimlessness, one of disillusionment and ennui (and privilege). I remember it well: spending months and months just drinking beer and playing pitch ‘n’ putt, feeling like life stretched out interminably in front of me, empty and meaningless.
Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), the titular graduate, moves back in with his parents the summer after finishing college. At his graduation party1, Ben is propositioned by Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), the wife of a family friend. She’s unhappy, he’s unhappy, and the pair begin a clandestine affair.
Then, a weird love triangle: Mrs. Robinson’s daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross) comes home from Berkeley and Ben’s parents, not knowing about Ben’s affair, pressure him into taking Elaine out. Ben accidentally falls in love with Elaine2, which Mrs. Robinson does not take well. She threatens to tell Elaine about their affair, so Ben confesses it himself, which Elaine does not take well. Like mother, like daughter.
That should be that, right? Nope. Ben decides that he’s going to marry Elaine and stalks her up to Berkeley. Elaine ends up back in Ben’s arms, but soon, uh-oh, Mr. Robinson tracks down Ben. He’s learned about both affairs, calls Ben scum, and whisks Elaine off to marry a Berkeley classmate. That gets us to the big climax where Ben races to the church to stop the wedding.
Ben’s too late to do a speak now, but he still makes a big scene and Elaine impulsively decides she’d rather be with the crazy dude than the dude she just married. Ben fights off Elaine’s entire family and the pair escape the church and board a bus. That’s when Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” starts up and you realize that this isn’t a happy ending.
This Vox article describes Ben thusly: “[I]t’s pretty hard to imagine anyone seeing Benjamin as some kind of rebellious hero. He seems a lot like the guy that many powerful men have turned out to be—acquisitive, careless, brutal, and yet somehow incredibly boring.” But that’s a feature, not a bug—of course the maladjusted, impulsive, depressed 21-year-old isn’t a hero. Why would you think he was?
Rating: 9/10, the graduate gets a postbac at the School of Hard Knocks.
Cast and Crew
Dustin Hoffman was 29 and a relative unknown when he filmed The Graduate. But all it took to go from nobody to A-lister was starring in the highest-grossing movie of the 1960s. But was Hoffman lucky or was he good? We’ll answer that question when we see his next film, Midnight Cowboy. (Spoiler: he’s good.)
You know how Dustin Hoffman was 29 and playing a new college graduate? Well Anne Bancroft was 35 and playing a woman with a daughter in college. We’ve mentioned her in previous Wrap-Up columns for her Tony- and Oscar-winning turn in The Miracle Worker and for her nomination for The Pumpkin Eater.
Besides iconic roles like Mrs. Robinson and Anne Sullivan, Anne Bancroft also was known for her marriage to Mel Brooks. Bancroft’ll be back in this column, and that’s just awesome.
Improv comedian and theater director Mike Nichols3 directed The Graduate and won a Best Director statute for his work. It was just his second film directorial effort; his first was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? That’s one helluva start to your film career right there.
Before his directorial career, Nichols was half of an improv comedy duo with Elaine May called, creatively, Nichols and May. Their recordings became big hits and they won a Grammy for the recording of their Broadway show, “An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May.” You can watch their telephone company bit here, though it’s, uh, pretty dated. Their comedy duo broke up in 1961 but was enormously influential.
That was Nichols’ first life in showbiz. His second was as a theater director. His breakout came directing the plays of Neil Simon, including “Barefoot in the Park” and “The Odd Couple.”4 He won Tonys in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘00s, and ‘10s, which, damn. That just left the “E” of the EGOT, and he checked that box with the TV movie Wit (2001).5
Nichols was married four times, but his most famous wife was ABC anchor Diane Sawyer. We won’t be watching any more of his movies, which means we’ll miss bangers like Silkwood, Heartburn, Working Girl, Postcards from the Edge, The Birdcage, and Charlie Wilson’s War. That’s a damn shame.
Most of the music in The Graduate was written by Paul Simon and performed by him and Art Garfunkel. Some of these tracks:
“Mrs. Robinson.” The song was originally titled “Mrs. Roosevelt,” but when it was used for the film, Simon changed it to reference Anne Bancroft’s character. The Lemonheads cover is good-bad, especially if you like covers that seem to know they’re not that good6.
“Scarborough Fair.” It has the famous opening line “Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.”
“The Sound of Silence.” This one starts with the lyrics “Hello darkness my old friend.” It’s a top-tier folk song, but disturbingly, when you Google “Sound of Silence,” it’s this bad-bad cover that comes up.
The Trivia
When Benjamin picks up Elaine for their date, Mrs. Robinson is watching “The Newlywed Game,” our Trivia theme for today.
Produced by game show extraordinaire Chuck Barris, “The Newlywed Game” had recently married couples trying to predict their partner’s responses to lightly risque questions. It was famous for the euphemism host Bob Eubanks would use for sex: he called it “making whoopee.”
Chuck Barris is also notable for having produced “The Dating Game” and “The Gong Show.”
“The Dating Game”: a contestant would ask three hidden suitors questions and choose one based on their answers.
“The Gong Show”: a talent show. When a contestant was bad, the judges would hit a large gong to stop the performance. Here’s Homer Simpson getting gonged. And somehow it spawned a spinoff called “The $1.98 Beauty Show.”7
All three were canceled when Barris put out “Three’s A Crowd,” a “Newlywed”-esque game where a man’s wife and his secretary would both answer questions about the man to see who knew him better. The show’s “scandalous undertones of infidelity” led to backlash and boycotts. What a quaint controversy.
Barris later wrote the “autobiography” “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” where he claimed to be a CIA assassin. It was adapted into a 2002 film, with George Clooney directing and Sam Rockwell playing Barris the assassin.8
Speed Round: Flags
When Benjamin stalks Elaine to college, there’s a shot of a hallway with lots of flags.
What are all those flags??
Left row, starting from the front: Australia, Nigeria, Ecuador, Algeria, Malaysia, and Indonesia (or, y’know, Monaco).
Right row, from the front: El Salvador (or maybe Nicaragua, who knows), South Vietnam, Nepal, Costa Rica (with its coat of arms), Hungary, Libya.
Cool, I’m glad we did that.
Odds and Ends
The 2005 film Rumor Has It… with Jennifer Aniston was about a woman whose mother and grandmother were supposedly Elaine and Mrs. Robinson…The Graduate is based on a novel by Charles Webb…Benjamin’s parents get him a 1966 Alfa Romeo Spider 1600 (the Duetto) for graduation…Ben drinks an Olympia beer…if you’re on a first date and you’re mean to your date and she starts crying and won’t stop even when you ask her to, perhaps kissing her will solve the problem…Buck Henry co-wrote The Graduate; we’ll see his work again in this column.
And if you’re struggling with ennui, just remember: there’s a great future in plastics.
At this party, a family friend offers Benjamin this advice: “I just wanna say one word to you—just one word—are you listening? Plastics.” That line ranked #42 on AFI’s “100 Years…100 Movie Quotes” list.
He tells her, “You’re the first thing for so long that I’ve liked. The first person I could stand to be with. My whole life is such a waste. It’s just nothing.”
Born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin, Germany.
He’d later do Simon’s “Plaza Suite” and “The Prisoner of Second Avenue,” and yeah, he won Tonys for those too.
And then, just to show it wasn’t a fluke, he won some more Emmys for the 2003 HBO miniseries “Angels in America.”
My favorite example of this is Cap’n Jazz’s cover of “Take On Me.”
I can’t tell if this is a play on a bit from Minnie Pearl, a comedian who would wear a straw hat with a $1.98 price tag attached to it.
Rockwell’s co-stars were Julia Roberts and Drew Barrymore. What a collection of talent to adapt such a ridiculous thing.
I agree with you that the ending is great, and unexpectedly ambiguous. I would recommend doing a compare/contrast with the end of "Georgy Girl," which not only got there a year earlier, but which still has the capacity to surprise, given how people misjudge it based on the commercial version of its theme song.
Oh, and thanks for pointing out the flags! I hadn't realized how much of that movie was shot on the USC campus, and how I unintentionally duplicated some of its shots in one of my student films! (See ~2:30-4:00 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HCdd9TfTq4 )