The Graduate
The Graduate – Another film released in 1967 that is often credited as helping abolish the Production Code and usher in the New American cinema is Mike Nichols’s The Graduate. The film is about a young man named Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) who is seduced by an older woman, Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft). Benjamin then falls in love with Mrs. Robinson's daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross). The film obviously caused controversy for its portrayal of a young man's sexual affairs with both a mother and her daughter.
Writer Frank Rich recounts some historical points on The Graduate: "...(The film) was the second time in 1967 that an iconoclastic American movie tapping into the incipient late-sixties mood had overridden some critical-establishment disdain to win large young audiences and Oscar nominations. The first was Bonnie and Clyde, whose director, Arthur Penn, and screenwriters, David Newman and Robert Benton, were openly inspired by France’s New Wave cinema; it would be hard to imagine their neo–gangster movie without antecedents like Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. That was not the style of The Graduate. While there is some bravura filmmaking along the way—a long montage capturing the alternately carnal and catatonic interludes of Benjamin’s lost summer, a final sequence that has become an icon of American movies—what would prove to be Nichols’s enduring directorial strengths are to be found in his movie’s crisp and witty screenplay, unerring casting, and the strong performances he elicited from the entire cast. Every role is memorably etched: William Daniels and Elizabeth Wilson as Benjamin’s parents, Murray Hamilton as Mr. Robinson, Norman Fell as an agitated Berkeley landlord, and even Buck Henry in a cameo as a hotel clerk. Nichols often cited Elia Kazan as a role model, and he shared Kazan’s zeal for prioritizing the casting and directing of actors, as well as Kazan’s ability to bring off the usually hopeless task of translating great plays to film. It could be argued that, along with The Graduate, the most enduring works of Nichols’s long career are both stage adaptations: (Who's Afraid of) Virginia Woolf (1966) and Angels in America (2003)...
It was for The Graduate that Nichols, then thirty-six, won his only Academy Award for best director, in 1968. While both The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde were nominated for best picture, they lost to a more conventional Hollywood slice of social realism, the Norman Jewison–directed In the Heat of the Night, a racial drama set in a small Southern town. Portentously enough, Oscar night that April had to be postponed two days because of the King assassination. Before long, American movies would more explicitly reflect a nation in the throes of tumult and sweeping change: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Brian De Palma’s Greetings, and Richard Lester’s Petulia arrived in 1968, followed by Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, Robert Downey Sr.’s Putney Swope, Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool, and Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant in 1969. The next year would bring Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock, Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, and Nichols’s own Catch-22.
Next to these films and those of the Coppola-Scorsese-Lucas-Spielberg New Wave soon to follow, The Graduate might seem to belong to another age. But in truth it straddles both the old and the new. It survives not just as a peerless Hollywood entertainment but as a one-of-a-kind cinematic portrait of America when it, like Benjamin Braddock at the edge of his parents’ swimming pool, teetered on the brink."
The following scene is perhaps one of the most iconic in the film. The scene highlights a more graphic depiction of sexuality and sexual desire than most films made prior to the end of the Production Code.
Film Clip
The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967):
The scene we saw in class...The seduction...
is the one where he drives home Mrs. Robinson and she forces him to come into his home.
Dustin plays a great reticent guy who is really forced at every moment to do what she says. Large shots of the outside and the bar. She puts on jazzy music. Camera flips back and forth to see his reactions to what she's saying. Then they are in the same frame - do you want to see Elaine's portrait? Will you come over here. Will you unzip my dress he tries to leave...I feel funny...come on it's hard for me to reach. What are you so scared of....you're going to bed and I shouldn't be up here. Would you like me to seduce you. I'm going home right now...i have to go home, I'm sorry....Bring up my purse...could you bring it up? I'm getting tired of all the suspicious. Will you stop acting this way and bring me the purse. Put it in Elaine's room. She sloses the door and she's naked...his neck turns around four time. Let me out. Jesus it's him!
Are you trying to seduce me scene Click Here
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