By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com
Wilmington on Movies: The Graduate
THE GRADUATE (Four Stars)
U.S.: Mike Nichols, 1967
Sometimes a movie comes at exactly the right time. Like The Graduate — director Mike Nichols’ and screenwriters Buck Henry’s and Calder Willingham’s marvelously edgy and arousing romantic comedy about plastics and family affairs and life in California, with one of those heroes, or anti-heroes, who strike a chord: young, nervous, recent college graduate, Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), who’s a little worried about his future and also torn between his clandestine affair with a married lover, Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) and his seemingly genuine open-air love for her beautiful college-age daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross).
The Graduate was released in the latter part of 1967, and it quickly became the movie of choice, and especially the dating movie of choice, for that year’s college-age film-going public, and many others as well. It’s remained a classic and is now regularly voted among the top American movies of all time, almost always above another 1967 gem, Arthur Penn’s and Warren Beatty’s (and Benton and Newman’s love-on-the-run period gangster romance Bonnie and Clyde — a movie that some of us at the time (me included) thought was the better show.
Speaking of Warren Beatty, he was also one of the many young actors considered for the role of Benjamin — along with Robert Redford and Charles Grodin, both of whom, with Beatty, would seem better fits for novelist Charles Webb’s original picture of Ben: as a tall, blonde good-looking very WASPy California athlete-scholar. (In fact, a Redford). But Nichols instead picked the lesser-known stage actor Dustin Hoffman, who had black hair instead of blonde, was short instead of tall, 29 instead of 21, had a nasal voice and frightened looking eyes instead of the usual movie star cool, and was Jewish instead of WASPy: an actor who seemed so totally off-type that Hoffman himself was convinced that he’d flubbed his audition– and was astonished when he got word a week later that Nichols had cast him .
Indeed, one of the things that works so well in The Graduate — along with Henry’s witty compression of Webb’s story, Robert Surtees’ glowing cinematography of California sunny days and sinuous nights, Nichols’ adroit casting and erotic flair and elegant long-take staging, the wonderful cast, and Simon and Garfunkel’s pitch-perfect song score (jey, who doesn’t feel a heart-leap when Ben’s red Alfa Romeo emerges from the darkness as he rushes to try to stop Elaine’s wedding and we hear that soaring refrain “Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson!”) –is the fact that Hoffman almost always seems out of place, which generates terrific tension. Tension is also generated, of course, by Anne Bancroft’s quietly ferocious performance as Mrs. Robinson, a Hell-hath-no-fury turn that can chill you to the bone.
A classic, definitely, yes. They don’t make them like this today, to our loss. Though I’ve got to admit I still prefer Bonnie and Clyde. (Chicago, Music Box, June 29-July 5)
“Redford and Charles Grodin, both of whom, with Beatty, would seem better fits for novelist Charles Webb’s original picture of Ben: as a tall, blonde good-looking very WASPy California athlete”
Since when is Charles Grodin not Jewish?
I hate when people try to bring their brilliant ethnic-based observations into things, and invariably get their facts wrong.