THE GRADUATE (1967)
There’s a number of reasons why I deliberately chose
1967 as the beginning year of my favourite period in film-making. Aside from
being a vital time in infusing film with the political and social engagement of
western youth, it was also a hugely fertile era in the drug and music inspired
counter-culture; the release of SERGEANT PEPPER (the birth of the concept music
album) and experimentation with form and technique in movies. Another exciting mould-breaking
aspect was in the casting of Hollywood and British films.
Already by the mid-‘60s, Britain had seen the rise of a
new generation of working-class actors who challenged the long-held notion that
only attractive and well-groomed, middle class Rank charm School-type actors
could play leading roles. Till then, If you sounded ‘common’ or looked somewhat
average, you were relegated into patronisingly depicted character parts who
provided colourful cockney chimney sweep support, for example, to the heroic
handsome leading man. Actors like Michael Caine, Albert Finney, Terence Stamp,
and Tom Courtenay not only emerged in films as viable bankable talent but in a
period when working-class credibility contributed to pop music, fashion and
more, their lives on screen became the focus of a film’s central interest
instead of background detail. Films like SATURDAY NIGHT, SUNDAY MORNING; THE
LONELINELESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE RUNNER and Michael Caine’s bespectacled,
low-key anti-Bond in the spy thriller THE IPCRESS FILE all injected new life
and interesting stories that better reflected the real world of the movie-goer.
State-side, Hollywood was somewhat slower to respond to
this egalitarian shift…until Mike Nichols went looking for the main part of
Benjamin Braddock in his film of THE GRADUATE. In Calder Willingham/Buck
Henry’s script, Ben is very much the tall, blond athletic Ivy League educated
WASP – essentially a Robert Redford type. In the film, you hear him celebrated
on his homecoming by family and frends as the ‘track star’. Nichols was daring
and shrewd in choosing the antithesis of this in Dustin Hoffman, a diminutive,
dark-haired Jewish actor but who gave Ben more interesting qualities than
someone like Redford would naturally. Hoffman suffered from veiled
anti-semitism in the reviews of the film, his large nose drawing comment aside
from other physical comparisons, but in his physicality and behaviour as Ben he
is instantly sympathetic. Whilst Redford would not have been a loss in the
role, his movie-star looks and an assumed appeal to college girls would have
made his virginity and seduction by Mrs Robinson far less believable.
Hoffman’s appeal is an ill-at-ease fumbling, a
willingness to do and say the right thing with his family’s friends, to be the
model graduate student – and it’s unfair to say he doesn’t embody something of
the winning physicality. He clearly trained hard to develop a good physique and
tan for the role, but it masks a little-boy-lost who is all potential but no
idea what to do with it when he comes home to begin his adult life. Amidst the
excellent actors populating the older generation of his people are William
Daniels and Elisabeth Wilson as his pushy socially-focused parents and Murray
Hamilton as the glib Mr Robinson.
Nichols is skillful at ensuring we are on Ben’s side
right from the opening, the camera tracking him closely from the airport
travelator and on to his home. He is surrounded by a bombardment of family and
friends all backslapping him and asking his plans, one well-meaning elder
giving him the famously gnomic tip-off of the future: “One word. Plastics!”. His closely-followed vacation humiliation
continues at his 21st birthday party when forced by his somewhat
insensitive father to parade in a present of full diving gear. We see the
partygoers from Ben’s point-of-view as he breathes loudly through the
respirator going in and under the water , a brilliant technique that isolates
us from their noisy good intentions and identifies with his. He leans against
the pool wall enjoying the peace in a nice pull-back that reinforced how alone
he is. The mood of this shot has been echoed by countless indie film-makers
since.
The two female leads are equal to the task of matching
Hoffman in striking and sympathetic characterisations of their own. As Mrs
Robinson, Anne Bancroft is a perfectly-realised portrait of bored, spoilt,
disappointed wealth. Her humdrum life is passionless, a monotonous directionless
playing-out of routine dulled by alcohol. She is nobody’s fool though. Bancroft
commands her space elegantly, her privileged lifestyle assuming the compliance
of waiters, and of Ben with feminine wiles. She is beautiful but covers up a
youth of crushed dreams, sidelined by the unexpected birth of their daughter
Elaine and now distracted when she can with affairs to retain some ego boosting
and booze to forget the rest. It’s not clear whether Mrs Robinson is accustomed
to regular cheating when she seduces Ben. She is certainly practised at getting
her own way and betrays nervousness at the activity – unlike him. The build-up
to the consummation of the adultery is cringingly funny. Hoffman’s ‘phone
conversations with her, his awkward relations with the hotel reception staff,
the crippling need to avoid social embarrassment, all met with serene and
puzzled grace by Bancroft, right up to the cunning way she goads him into
taking her by mocking his perceived ‘inadequacy’.
As Elaine, Katharine Ross is not only gorgeous but also
instills a male desire to protect her like a delicate flower. I don’t care if
that sounds sexist. I defy any male not to feel huge empathy for her when Ben
takes her out on their date unwillingly and subjects her to a rude
inappropriate front-row show of a stripper swinging her tassles at her. Her
innocent confusion and tears are heart-breaking. Ben is full of remorse,
breaking though the pose of trying to put her off out of a deal he made to
continue seeing her mother – realising that this truly is the woman for him.
Ben is then given a purpose for the first time since
the plot started, to win Elaine at all costs, against her family’s opposition
(the affair has been outed by Mrs Robinson, cynically spinning herself as raped
to cause extra hardship for Ben) and Elaine’s hastily arranged marriage to
someone she doesn’t love. Hoffman goes into overdrive, committing hell-bent to
the emotional nakedness of his need for her, uncaring of the consequences.
There’s a welcome cameo by Norman Fell as his temporary landlord, a
slow-burning disapproving of Ben’s volatile love-life - and a fleeting glimpse of young Richard
Dreyfus as a nosy student offering to call the cops.
Hoffman amps up the stakes by literally running after Elaine
and then turning up at the church in what has since become a staple climax of
rom-coms. It’s a crowd-pleasing moment when he presses himself to the
upper-window glass, screaming Elaine’s name as the wedding service ends. Amidst
the cleverly-silenced ferocious curses of her parents, Elaine screams his name
back primally like a mating call and they fight off the attendees to escape
onto a bus. The closing image of them is a subtly-played and directed two-shot as
their adrenaline gradually subsides into a dawning understanding that they no
idea what their future prospects will be - in a world without parental support and a
love that is uncertain…
A special mention must go to the sublime, evocative
Simon and Garfunkel songs liberally woven into the film. Wistful, urgent, clean
and bright or darker-toned, their work is one of the best uses of pop music in
modern film.
THE GRADUATE paved the way for actors like Gene
Hackman, Al Pacino, Robert Duvall and Richard Dreyfus, top talent whose
appearance in a former age would have consigned them to playing heavies and
character parts, to inhabit central roles that would immensely enrich the film
they made. This film is deservedly a classic not just for its quality but for
what it represents in breaking stereotypes…
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