The Graduate (Lawrence Turman Productions, Embassy Pictures, 1967)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, April 26) my husband Charles and I watched a Turner Classic Movies showing of the 1967 film The Graduate, directed by Mike Nichols from a script by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry (who’s also in the movie in a minor role as one of the well-to-do people who make the title character’s life a gilded hell) based on a novel by Charles Webb. I remember seeing this in a theatre with my mother when it first came out – it’s always a weird feeling when a channel called Turner Classic Movies showed a film I first watched on its initial theatrical release – and I believe Charles and I had watched it together once before. The Graduate is a film whose central premise still grips one with its sheer audacity: Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman in the part that made him a star; he’d done one film previously, a James Bond spoof called Madigan’s Millions, but this was the role that people noticed him in) has just returned from college and is living in his old room at the home of his parents (William Daniels and Elizabeth Wilson). They throw him a preposterous welcome-home party during which they give him a car – a red Alfa-Romeo streamlined sportster that practically becomes a character itself – and a SCUBA diving suit complete with harpoon. The scene in which Benjamin demonstrates this gift by walking into the Braddocks’ swimming pool in it is one of the most brilliant moments in a film full of them, especially when Nichols gives us a point-of-view shot through the wet suit’s visor and we see the Braddocks and their equally fatuous friends but all we hear are the sounds of Benjamin breathing in and out. It’s a marvelous metaphor for Benjamin’s alienation. The film takes a bizarre turn when Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft, top-billed), wife of Mr. Braddock’s business partner, asks Benjamin to drive her home since her husband has driven off in their car. Once they get there, she demands that he walk her in and shows him around their house, including the bedroom of the Robinsons’ daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross). She also undresses in front of Benjamin, asking him to help her unzip her dress (when I was in my teens I didn’t “get” why women’s dresses were deliberately made so difficult to remove that they frequently needed men to help them get them off) and provoking the now-classic line from Benjamin, “Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me!”

While all this is going on, we’ve been hearing the angst-ridden music of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel on the soundtrack, including the rock-band version of “The Sounds of Silence” as Benjamin got off the plane at LAX and a few songs from their catalogue, including “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” and “April, Come She Will.” (Simon wrote a number of songs specifically for the film, including “At the Zoo” for the scene in which Benjamin stalks Mrs. Robinson’s daughter Elaine [Katharine Ross] through the San Francisco Zoo, but the only one that was used is an early version of “Mrs. Robinson” heard during a scene towards the end in which Benjamin is heading back to Southern California to break up Elaine’s wedding to someone else.) Eventually Mrs. Robinson orders Benjamin not only to meet her at the Taft Hotel for a sexual rendezvous but to dominate him so totally he comes off as the sub in an S/M relationship. With the Production Code still in nominal effect (it wouldn’t definitively die until the following year, when the Motion Picture Producers’ and Distributors’ Association scrapped its rotting carcass at long last and replaced it with the ratings system), we don’t get to see much of exactly what Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson were doing in bed – a bit of Code-mandated reticence which actually makes me glad. Eventually Benjamin yields to the pressure from his own dad and also from Mr. Robinson to take Elaine out on a date – where he deliberately tries to make it the Date from Hell so she won’t want to see him again and he won’t have to worry about Mrs. Robinson’s threat to tell all to Elaine if he ever does date her daughter. Benjamin takes Elaine to a strip club and, while the lead stripper is twirling the tassels on her pasties with the motions of her breasts, Benjamin rubs it in by asking Elaine, “Can you do that?” (I remember asking my mother what that scene meant!) Ultimately, though, Benjamin decides he not only likes Elaine, he’s determined to marry her even though, once Elaine learns that the older woman Benjamin has been seeing is her own mother, she can’t stand him. She flees to Berkeley, where she’s been attending college all along, and Benjamin follows her and essentially stalks her.

Benjamin rents a room from a landlord, Mr. McCleary (Norman Fell, a welcome sight here), who takes an instant dislike to him when Benjamin tells him he’s not a UC Berkeley student and the landlord asks, “Are you one of them outside agitators?” Elaine accepts a marriage proposal from medical student Carl Smith (Brian Avery), a perfectly plastic piece of WASP nice-manhood (he looks like a Ken doll!), and of course Benjamin is determined to crash their wedding and break them up so he can have the girl of his dreams. That ultimately happens, in a scene in which screenwriters Willingham and Henry make a key change from Webb’s novel. In the book, Benjamin kidnaps Elaine from the wedding before the ceremony is complete; in the movie, they’re actually legally married before Benjamin crashes the ceremony and takes her out of there. Then end up on a bus going heaven knows where, and Mad magazine did a delicious parody of this film in which Elaine starts nagging Benjamin and he says, “Oh, mother!” “You mean, you miss your mother?” Elaine says in the Mad parody. “No,” says Benjamin; “I miss your mother!” The Graduate is an odd film to see in 2024, partly because the entire role of college has changed big-time due to what I call educational inflation. Since just about all the well-paying or even decently paying jobs these days demand some level of higher education, college has changed from a sort of playpen for the affluent we saw in films like Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman to essentially a training school for middle-class careers. A modern-day equivalent of Benjamin Braddock wouldn’t be drifting aimlessly between the repulsive older people in his life. He’d be obsessing over how the hell he was going to repay all his student loans – unless we’re supposed to believe that Benjamin’s parents were so wealthy they covered the costs of his education, which given the visible indicia of their lifestyle is actually quite credible.

My main problem with The Graduate is we never really get a sense of what motivates these characters beyond their most superficial anxieties and drives. They’re all pretty cartoonish, and it’s hard to believe this film was made just 12 years after Rebel Without a Cause, which actually conveyed a much more credible version of youthful alienation. It’s hard to believe anyone ever saw Benjamin Braddock, with his terminal indecision and his roles as an adulterer in act one and a stalker in act two, as a hero to be admired and emulated! The Graduate succeeds on a number of levels; Dustin Hoffman is perfectly cast as Benjamin (some other actors were considered, including Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and Charles Grodin, but Hoffman’s sheer ordinariness and unattractiveness – he’s decent-looking enough but no one ever mistook Dustin Hoffman for a male sex god – just makes him right for the role), and I liked the fact that Anne Bancroft and Katharine Ross looked enough alike you could easily accept them as mother and daughter. In fact, another thing I like about The Graduate is they didn’t overdo the age makeup on Anne Bancroft; she looks precisely like a woman in early middle age who’s basically taken care of herself (she references having been an alcoholic in one scene, but that doesn’t stop her from drinking in the here and now) and looks good enough one can accept Benjamin willing to have an affair with her instead of retching at the thought of doing the down ‘n’ dirty with this old hag. Ironically, when he was offered this film Hoffman originally turned it down because he was supposed to play the role that eventually went to Gene Wilder in Mel Brooks’s The Producers – a part Wilder was so “right” for it’s hard to imagine anyone else doing it. Brooks was initially reluctant to let Hoffman go until he found out that Mrs. Mel Brooks, Anne Bancroft, was already set for the female lead in The Graduate, and Brooks released Hoffman from his contract with the words, “If you’re good enough for her, you’re good enough for me.” Also in the late 1970’s there was brief talk about Hoffman making a sequel to The Graduate, which fell through because no one could come up with a suitable story. Actually there was a suitable story: a novel by the original author, Charles Webb, called The Abolitionist of Clark Gable Place, published in 1975 – 12 years after The Graduate – and though he gave the protagonist a different name, my then-girlfriend Cat and I both read it in the late 1970’s and thought it would have made a perfect sequel to The Graduate.