The Graduate 1967
I first saw this movie in college at the student center. As Benjamin is floating in the pool at his parents’ house in Los Angeles, his father asks him why he spent so much money sending him to college, and Ben answers “You got me” to an explosion of applause from the audience of students at one of America’s most expensive universities.
The Graduate blew me away in 1985 or so when I saw it and it is still one of my very favorite movies. I love the writing, the characters, the music, the directing, just everything works perfectly. It is a movie I bought on VHS, then DVD, and now Blu-ray. I bought the Criterion Collection edition from 2016 which has a commentary track with the director, Mike Nichols, and another of my favorite directors, Steven Soderburgh. I wanted to hear them so much that I tried listening to the commentary first, but it had been a few years since I had seen the movie last, and I was trying too hard to listen to the movie and not them, so I watched the movie without the commentary, then watched again with them. And it still holds up, maybe even better as the two directors talk about the great writing Buck Henry contributed, the phenomenal performances by Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft, and how beautiful Katharine Ross was.
I feel like The Graduate is a dividing line between old movies and new ones, with everything prior feeling dated and theatrical and everything after feeling more realistic and alive. Maybe it wasn’t the only movie going in that direction at the time, but I still feel like it set a new bar. Even the smaller performances of the parents were great and Buck Henry got a choice role after writing the script from the original novel (he shared credits with another writer whose script was never used and Nichols was involved pretty heavily too).
The extras reveal a lot of stories about the making of the movie including a few different versions (Dustin Hoffman takes credit for his character’s whimper, while Mike Nichols said he gave it to Hoffman based on a whimper Nichols sometimes had). One thing neat is that even though it seems like a groundbreaking movie by newcomers, they all paid their dues, coming up through theater for years. Then everything fell together in just the right way (including the ending on the bus which was supposed to just be happy, but ended up more pensive and far less triumphant). I even watched a second commentary by a film professor, which covers some literary themes and technical aspects of the movie and I still enjoyed watching it all (basically watching the entire movie three times in one weekend, plus a lot of interviews). There are a few moments that maybe don’t work, but for a 50 year old movie and a comedy at that where not every joke is going to stick (let alone stand the test of time), it is still fun to watch with so many memorable moments and lines. One thing they talk about is that the attitude towards the movie has waned a little, with the movie appearing at #7 in AFI’s first Top 100 list in 1998, then dropping to #17 ten years later (the latter list being a little more questionable in my opinion). It is interesting that when I first saw the movie it was already old, almost 20 years old. But now it is 50! And to me it still resonates just as strongly.
Written: 13 Aug 2017
Owned on: Blu-ray, DVD