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“They become their parents.”

Started by tomwatson · 10 months ago

Greetings. Relax. You have not been drafted. I’m just welcoming you to the first open thread in our new newcritics series of open threads, Wednesday Night at the Movies. The thread officially opens at 10 PM, Eastern. But if you’re here a little early, don’ ... Continue reading »

100 comments

  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Ok, where do you want to start? With the ending or should we get right down to the age thing?
    reply
  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    I was thinking Elaine had already been made into a Stepford Wife - but that's about eight years off.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Somebody want to put something on the stereo?
    reply
  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Sure, Lance. What do you suggest?
    reply
  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Simon and Garfunkel?
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Good call.
    reply
  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Hello, Watson, my old friend...
    reply
  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    Scarborough Fair always takes me back...
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    I've come to blog with you again...
    reply
  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Hey, Tom, how ya doing?

    Was that a comment on Elaine or a crack about Katherine Ross' acting ability?
    reply
  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    Point of order - might this discussion beyond a "live" hour? Since we're not watching, seems like this virtual fest might have a longer horizon than what we've done with TV shows?
    reply
  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    The latter! She always seemed like a mannequin, even in Butch & Sundance...
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Well, I'm here until the last dog gets hung, but I'm hoping we run out of rope or dogs before midnight.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Don't get me started on her in Butch Casdidy.

    "Keep going, schoolteacher lady..."
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Her living doll routine kind of works for Elaine, though, don't you think?
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  • Jason Chervokas

    1 year ago

    I never really was a big Mike Nichols or Nichols and May fan. But The Graduate is just perfect. Anne Bancroft, of course, is smoking hot. The first MILF is still the best. But I never thought so much that she was playing older...I guess she was if she were old enough to be Hoffman's mother, presuming that Dustan's character is circa 22. It was more that Hoffman was playing younger, a lot younger.

    No doubt Ben & Elaine would have wound up late 1960s early 1970s california divorcees, something right out of a Joan Didion essay.

    In a little aside, Rumor Has It, a smarmy little movie w/ Kevin Costner, Jennifer Aniston, and Shirley McClain is entirely a riff on The Graduate and Pasadena, and I must say, I enjoyed it.

    In the end, I think there's really no heros or villans in the movie, and, frankly, I think precious little character development. Ben and Elaine's "relationship" like lots of young relationships, is clingy, half baked, immature, destined to fail. A sequal would have been relentlessly grim, kinda like The Godfather II.
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  • Victoria

    1 year ago

    "By setting out to sleep with Ben, she’s threatening to destroy her marriage"

    OR...

    That marriage is already so dead she doesn't even feel or consider this possibility.

    Maybe Ben - the recent grad - takes her back to a time just after she lost her life to this awful marriage?

    "When Ben starts dating Elaine, Mrs Robinson sets out to destroy her own daughter’s future happiness"

    OR...

    She considers Ben poisoned goods. After all, she has poisoned him. What if she's protecting her daughter in some bizarrely twisted way that is born of self-loathing?

    I feel for Mrs. Robinson...a walking dead woman to whom art once spoke.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Victoria, good point about the poisoning. But she doesn't seem all that protective during the melee in the church.
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  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    Well, the Graduate - I was always disappointed in a "what's the big deal?" kinda way. Of course, I saw it a good decade after it was made, but it always seemed rather detached. Why were we to care about Ben's disenchantment with convention, or his cold romance with Elaine (if you can call it that). Bancroft was the center of it and she certainly created a recurring character. The famous soundtrack (and I like the songs) reinforced that detachment, but parts of it now look like a first generation music video.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Jason, so Kevin Costner works as a middle-aged Dustin Hoffman? Or is he supposed to be the character from the novel?
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Victoria, I'm thinking the Robinson's marriage was dead from the start or at least from the moment Elaine was born. What she's killing isn't the romance but the business arrangement.
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  • Victoria

    1 year ago

    "No doubt Ben & Elaine would have wound up late 1960s early 1970s california divorcees"

    Probably true. But I used to think I was teaching the children of the Ben & Elaine (types) in the movie (that is, late sixties college grads) - people who, though unconsciously unsettled by the energies of the decade, never really caught the conscious part of it. The kind of Boomers who are vaguely off to the side of their generation.
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  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    I tell ya what worked in that flick was an older Shirley MacLaine - she was great.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Also, by destroying her marriage she'd be destroying the illusions of a lot of her friends and neighbors, possibly forcing them to confront the emptiness at the hearts of their own marriages.
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  • Jason Chervokas

    1 year ago

    I don't agree w/ Tom. I think the movie is great, but weirdly static...everyone's frozen in a social role, and deadened emotionally, and despite the end when it looks like Ben & Elaine have broken free, we know they haven't...it's static-ness gave the movie a kind of modernism in its time, I'm sure, but it also means the movie lacks the old verities of character development, transformation, etc. I think it works beautifully because it's so beautifully observed. But it's true that it doesn't go anywhere. Seems like that's a flaw for Tom, tho' I suspect it's the whole point.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    I used to think I was teaching the children of the Ben & Elaine (types) in the movie (that is, late sixties college grads) - people who, though unconsciously unsettled by the energies of the decade, never really caught the conscious part of it. The kind of Boomers who are vaguely off to the side of their generation.

    That describes a lot of us, sadly.
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  • Jason Chervokas

    1 year ago

    Lance, I think it's more the novel that's at the heart of Rumor Has It, but I never read the book so I'm not on top of the whole Graduate mythos. Worth catching on HBO, where it's in pretty heavy rotation.
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  • Victoria

    1 year ago

    I agree with both Tom and Lance that it's a movie that was oddly out of its time, which probably (1) helped ease the broad audience into the genuinely subversive indies that would follow, and (2) lulled those studio execs into a naive security that let them give so much free reign to all those great directors who would make the 1970's the real golden age of movies.

    But what The Graduate has in spades is style. In the performances. In the remodeled noir touches. In tremendously sophisticated use of color.
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  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    Sure it's a fine movie (beautifully made with some great exterior shots), but that static nature seems like a tic after a while - and it probably has to do with Hoffman's constant dead-pan throughout. Yeah, their lives are emotionally bankrupt and nothing changes among the upper middle class...
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    I like the movie and don't mind the staticness. But I like something different about it every time I watch it.

    This time it was all the scenes in the hotel lobby and bar.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    I also liked the scene where Ben goes to the frat house and all the brothers talk about Elaine's fiance as if he was Sam Malone.
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  • Jason Chervokas

    1 year ago

    Victoria, you're right about the color. The movie is really a transitional movie--still the brightly lit bright color of studio hollywood, not yet the dark, muted color of, say, The Godfather, etc.
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  • Victoria

    1 year ago

    I love Ben being **conveyed** in the opening airport scene. That he would end up on that bus is just perfect.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    But we've seen the guy and we know he can't possibly be the lothario they're describing. If he's gotten past first base with any girl, it's because she met him at first and carried him down to second herself. Among these guys, all it takes to be known as a hound is to actually touched a live girl. These are the future Mr Robinsons.
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  • Adorable Girlfriend

    1 year ago

    I am a bitter kitten as of late. I hate all movies where love or romance are involved.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Hey, I think there are lurkers out there. I can hear them breathing.

    Yo! Lurkers! Chime in already!
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    AG, I think that's the $64,000 question about the Graduate: Are love and romance really at stake here?
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  • Adorable Girlfriend

    1 year ago

    I dunno. The 64K question in the movie and for me is why do the ones who want it the most get hurt the deepest?
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  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    I'm a sucker for the vintage California locations, I have to say - nice point about the color. This was only a decade after Vertigo, another sublime CA locations flick.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Victoria, what you said about the movie's style...I think that's part of what I like about the hotel scenes.

    That hotel is almost something out of Hitchcock. You can see Cary Grant wandering in there on his way to Chicago in North By Northwest. I can even picture him in Ben's place when he's caught at the doorway by all those old people coming out of the party. The fact that it's Ben Braddock there and not Cary Grant adds to the comedy for me.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    AG:I dunno. The 64K question in the movie and for me is why do the ones who want it the most get hurt the deepest?

    Who do you think wants it the most in the movie?
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  • Adorable Girlfriend

    1 year ago

    I haven't seen the movie in like 100 years, but if memory serves me it was Ben. (Correct me if I am wrong. I saw it only once and it was a long time ago.)
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  • Victoria

    1 year ago

    Lance, I haven't been able to get to the book yet. It's right here, so close I can touch it. Like just now - there, I touched it. But all I know about it is from an online interview with the author by Elvis Mitchell on KCRW. Am wondering if it says much about things that found their way into the film accidentally but have been interpreted as having Big Meaning. - This has always fascinated me about film history: how often things happen in film making that weren't planned but end up making the film a very specific thing. One of my favorite examples: Bob Balaban published his journal from the making of Close Encounters. The original script had a substantial subplot about Truffaut's character loving porn. Every single thing they shot for this ended up damaged in some way and they had to drop that whole element. Now, imagine that film with the pornography stuff! I say that movie knew better and made sure it didn't get messed up by some director's personal fascination and over-emphasis on playing with one of his director-heroes. There are so many tales like this. Someone should collect them into a book some time.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Ah, the other $64,000 question: Just what does Ben want?
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  • Jason Chervokas

    1 year ago

    I don't get the sense that anyone's really in love in the graduate, tho ben thinks he's in love. Pretty sure Elaine knows in her heart of hearts that she's not in love w/ Ben...who could be, he's just as empty as everyone else in the move, an emptiness he masks with a would-be worldly cynicism, a faux knowningness which in turn masks his own naivete.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Victoria, that's an interesting story. I never heard that one before. That would mean that Spielberg's first two big hits were the result of lucky accidents. The mechanical shark never worked right during the shooting of Jaws so he couldn't show the shark as soon as and as often as he'd have liked. Imagine that movie if the shark kept popping up every five minutes.
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  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    Ben wants to not have what he has.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    The Graduate started out as a very different kind of movie. Based on what made it to the screen it's impossible to imagine Robert Redford or Warren Beatty as Ben Braddock, but judging by what Mark Harris says about the novel, which I've never read, a tall handsome preppy type would have been the right choice for Ben, if the script had been faithful to the novel.
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  • Victoria

    1 year ago

    Lance: Oh. So maybe it was Spielberg's guardian angel what killed the porn!

    JC says "(Ben's) just as empty as everyone else in the move" ... Really? I think he's lost, but doesn't he show some genuine feeling and vulnerability to Elaine? Couldn't she be drawn to this as more alive than what she has known?
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  • donna darko

    1 year ago

    It was kinda boring when I saw it in the 80s. Cinematography was fine. Mrs. Robinson is an anti-heroine. Was Hoffman miscast? Great actor but what does she see in him?
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Other writers worked on the script before Buck Henry took it over, and Henry's getting it was the result of an accident. He happened to be at a party that Mike Nichols happened to be at and they happened to wind up talking and they happened to hit it off, according to Harris.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Donna. I think she sees her own lost youth. And an opportunity to cause mischief.
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  • Jason Chervokas

    1 year ago

    Victoria, that's not the way I see it. I think Ben knows he's not happy, but I don't get the sense that he has a real inner life or knows what would make him happy, and I get the sense that his "relationship" w/ Elaine isn't really something that comes from any genuine feeling but from the desire to experience some genuine feeling projected on to an obvious scrim.
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  • donna darko

    1 year ago

    Cinematography reminded me a bit of the Ice Storm.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Jason, I think you're right about Ben, but I don't know about Elaine, because Ross doesn't give much away. And this gets back to what Tom and I were beginning to talk about up top. Just how much of Elaine is due to Ross' bad acting and how much to her being the kind of a person who has learned how to be an obedient cipher so as not to upset her fragile and volatile mother?
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  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    I'm kinda with Donna - to me, Ben's in love with the idea of his own passion, but not with the actual women in the movie. So the "passion" seems like acting in a way (which of course it was) - perhaps it's having not seen the movie in its time, I just never bought the rebellion of those relationships. The shocking center didn't seem so shocking, and it was always obvious Hoffman and Bancroft weren't a full generation apart.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Donna,

    One of the things Buck Henry told Mark Harris for Pictures at a Revolution is that he, Henry, thinks that Mike Nichols unconsciously drove the writing and the rewriting of the script in such a way that the character of Ben became something of a self-portrait of Nichols.
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  • Jason Chervokas

    1 year ago

    Well, that's just it Tom, it's not a real passion or a real rebellion...Ben & Elaine may think it is, and by 1973 they would have awakened to discover they're in a dead end marriage just like their parents. Maybe after their divorce they would have individually turned to other things--Est, fundamentalist Christianity, or scientology...--which also would have left them unfulfilled.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Nichols was an immigrant who came to America as a boy. He never really understood America but he had a gift for observation and "fitting in." Ben returns to his home state but in the years he's been away at school he's become an outsider. He feels like a foreigner among the people he should know best and who should know him best and he finds them and their "customs" strange and confusing. He adopts two strategies to cope. He withdraws and he plays along. The playing along lands him at the bottom of the pool in his scuba gear, feeling alone and lost.

    The hotel scenes show Ben trying to play along with the local customs too.
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  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    I always liked the use of the cross in the geta-away scene...
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  • donna darko

    1 year ago

    So Nichols chose Hoffman as his Everyman. I remember Hoffman put off by Bancroft most of the time and forget if they hit it off. Looks like they did. Empty, middle class life.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Elaine is another go along to get along type. She does it because she's a good and obedient daughter. But the result is the same. At the end she and Ben are left alone with the one person in the world they don't have to fake it with, which should make them happy. But they just don't know how to do it on their own. The possibility is that they will learn how to be "real" with each other. The other possibility is that they will fall into their most comfortable old habits and start playing along with each other, pretending to be the only kind of married people they know how to be, their parents.

    Maybe that's what Nichols meant.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    There are still lurkers lurking. I can see their shoes sticking out from underneath the arras.
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  • donna darko

    1 year ago

    Elaine was Stepford wife-y. That I remember. Sad but enviable life.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    You know what though, there's a scene in which Ben and Elaine are in the red Alpha Romeo eating burgers off of trays at a drive-in restaurant and they're just talking and munching on their fries and sipping on the straws in their milk shakes. We can't hear them. But they are clearly wrapped up in their conversation and it's a happy moment. Maybe the only truly happy moment in the whole movie. They just seem so right together. If they aren't really in love, they're close enough.

    One of the evils of the situation Ben has gotten himself into is that he and Elaine aren't going to be allowed to have more dates like this. This is all they need right now, a summer romance, but somehow it's got to be all or nothing for them.
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  • donna darko

    1 year ago

    There's a get away scene? I kept waiting for the word "plastics" which was well into the movie.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Actually, donna, plastics gets said within the first five minutes of the movie. It's in one of the YouTube videos Tom posted a link to at his place.
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  • donna darko

    1 year ago

    Just what does Ben want?

    He's bored and doesn't know what he wants.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Tom had to pack it in. He says goodnight. I'll hang around for a while yet. Maybe some folks from out west will turn up or the lurkers will get some courage. But the thread's going to stay open forever so feel free to come and go over the next couple of days.
    reply
  • Dan Leo

    1 year ago

    I couldn't quite bring myself to get off my ass and watch the movie again, which I haven't seen in many years, but after this discussion I confess i might give it another shot. One thing that made me reluctant to rent it was the fear that I would find it hopelessly dated and obvious, although I love Bancroft and Hoffman as artists (much more so than I admire Mike Nichols).

    Isn't it funny that Dustin Hoffman's first two starring movie roles ended with him sitting in a bus with someone?

    That ending of Midnight Cowboy is just classic.
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  • donna darko

    1 year ago

    Memory fails. After "plastics," I tried to hang on. Maybe I'll watch it again.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Commenter on my post about Charlie Wilson's War today, over at my place, thinks he sees a streak of misogyny in all of Nichols' films. I'm not sure I see it, but what do you think?
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  • donna darko

    1 year ago

    Oh yes, definitely, and you asked the right person but I'll let lurkers continue!
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Dan, I didn't feel the movie was at all dated, although it's clearly a product of its time. The reason for that is something I was trying to get at in my post above. For all its reputation, The Graduate isn't really a 60s movie. It's almost timeless. Ben's dilemma is universal. There are thousands of versions of his plight being lived out every year at graduation time.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Also, the script contains very little "period" dialog. Nobody says groovy. Simon and Garfunkel turned out to be a good choice for the music, not just for their songs' commentary on the action, but because their style has never gone out of fashion. If you'd never heard them before until today and somebody told you they were kids just starting out you might believe it.

    The clothing and hair styles aren't ridiculous either. In 1967 people were still dressing somewhat classically.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    And like I said, the movie completely ignores the politics of the time.

    Donna, I don't think the lurkers are going to help us out, so feel free to give us your answer.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Dan, maybe we can make that a future series for Wednesday Night at the Movies.
    "Great Films That End With Dustin Hoffman on a Bus."
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Things are growing quiet. Too quiet.
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  • donna darko

    1 year ago

    There's a streak of misanthope not just misogyny in Closer. His women are static and conventional or victims of sexism i.e. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The Graduate, Working Girl, Regarding Henry, Postcards from the Edge, Closer.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    What's that I hear?
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Sounds like the sound of silence.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    At least donna's still here.

    I think you're right. People-hating seems to be one of Nichols' hobbies.

    I haven't seen Closer. Virginia Wolf, The Graduate, Postcards From the Edge, Working Girl, Primary Colors, and Charlie Wilson's War all contain variations on a type of woman---the domineering scold who bullies and belittles and bosses all the men and at least one young woman, often her daughter or a daughterly type. But I'm not sure if he's drawn to the movies by those characters themselves or by the opportunities they give to his favorite actresses to strut their stuff.
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  • donna darko

    1 year ago

    Lance, I answered you.

    Carnal Knowledge is also based static women roles.
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  • donna darko

    1 year ago

    I scared them off and will leave you to others!

    Good discussion. Thanks, Lance.
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Sorry, donna, I guess I was typing while you were answering.

    It's been too long since I've seen Carnal Knowledge. I'm afraid to look at it again. Can Art Garfunkel act?
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  • Lance Mannion

    1 year ago

    Goodnight, donna. Thanks for joining in.

    Getting late for me too. Lurkers, I hope you're there. I was expecting a few more people and I hope the reason they didn't show wasn't the awful weather in the Midwest. That is, I hope everybody out that way is ok.

    Thanks, Jason, Tom, Victoria, AG, and Dan too.

    If you're showing up here late, please feel free to leave your thoughts. Like I said, the thread's staying open all week.

    Goodnight.

    Unplug the coffee pot before you go, please?
    reply
  • donna darko

    1 year ago

    Sure thing. Good night.
    reply
  • Chuck Tryon

    1 year ago

    It looks like the party is over. I sort of feel like one of the wedding guests watching as th e bus drives away, but I'll throw in my $.02 about a few things.

    I only discovered this film as a teen in the 1980s, but I think I related to its critique of conformity, the restless energy that made the film feel "new" even though it was--at the time--about 20 years old. But that probably says something about growing up in Reaganland.

    That being said, certain scenes in The Graduate teach beautifully. the sound during the scuba scene really captures Hoffman's isolation brilliantly. It's an incredibly seductive film in so many ways.

    I do think the comments about Nichols' female characters make a lot of sense. In fact, I found Closer somewhat troubling for that very reason.

    More later if others join in again...
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  • M. George Stevenson

    1 year ago

    Saw the movie for the 30th anni, read the book not long afterwards. Charles Webb's novel, published in 1965 if memory serves, is an almost explicit "On the Road" parody, as if Kerouac's journey were undertaken by an upper-middle class kid driven by the same quest for sincerity and realness but utterly agnostic about the existence of either. Quite an impressive performance and deadpan-funny as hell. As is what became of Webb, who drifted, wrote a little, married a woman, divorced her but still lived with her as dual caretakers of a nudist camp (as of 10-15 years ago). It was impossible not to see Hoffman while reading the book, but it wasn't much of an issue as the deadpan was completely congruent with his reading of the role.

    Re the thread, which I just finished, I really like the Nichols-as-Ben notion, which fits perfectly with the novel's idea that people want realness but, at a certain income level, don't really want to get stuck there and so work out how to get along in the comfort zone.

    As for the look, as someone who grew up visiting SoCal annually during the time in question, it's so dead on as to be scary -- Nichols' East Coast eye really getting the subtle differences in between Connecticutt and Pasadena high-WASP, which is also why William Daniels is so perfect -- an obviously East Coast guy who went to USC and stayed.

    Re the ending, I've always loved it because it so perfectly captured the aftermath of any dramatic gesture made by a sentient being -- OMG, I did it!/OMG, what have I done? -- AND made a visual contrast to the opening image of motion (this notion is the fruit of a freshman year weekend in Spring 1977 during which I saw The Graduate and Carnal Knowledge as a double bill and a second double bill of An American in Paris and Meet Me in St. Louis and became convince of the auteur theory).
    Sorry to wax... (and what's up with the time stamping?)
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  • Victoria

    1 year ago

    Awfully good job. Lance. --- But for the sound of gunshots in the neighborhood... right close, I might add... I would have been here longer. - I gotta say I'm having a hard time going with the misogyny notion vis-a-vis that film list. And, of course, I've read nothing but good things from the women he's worked with. But it would be interesting if a man served actual women well, while creating characters that revealed something else entirely. Interesting, but I don't see it here. His humor with May indicates his interest in playing with difficult types. But how is that misogynistic?
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  • Dan Leo

    1 year ago

    Sorry, Lance, took a break to do some of my own stuff.

    Is Nichols misogynistic? Who the hell knows? It seems like he's pretty rough on the male gender too, but on the other hand I just read your addendum post on "Charlie Wilson" where you talk about how he (or Sorkin, or both of them in cahoots) tossed some pretty weak-sister female parts into that movie.

    You know what I saw in the fairly recent past and really hated? And this is gonna get me in trouble because a lot of people think it's great, but I couldn't stand "Virginia Woolf". The movie, not the writer. It's been too long since I've read the play for me to say if I would now hate the play, too, but I suspect I wouldn't be too crazy about it. I just thought the movie was so unbelievable, and unbelievably tiresome, and I didn't think the fault lay with the actors. I thought the problem was the script. But when I saw that movie as a kid I thought it was great, God knows why, maybe because everyone said it was great.

    On the other hand I'd be interested in checking out "Catch-22" and "Carnal Knowledge" again. After twenty years or more I can still recall some of Nicholson's line-readings in "Carnal". God he was good. And I remember Art Garfunkel being quite acceptable in that and in "Catch-22".

    Sometimes an entertainer who's not really a trained actor can be pretty good if the real actors in the show help them out. Classic example: Frank Sinatra and the great Monty Clift in "From Here to Eternity". Slightly less classic example: Dean Martin and Monty Clift in "The Young Lions". Some artists are so good they make everyone else look good.
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  • Tom W.

    1 year ago

    Hey, I thought this was an excellent debut - I came in with less than a abundant appreciation of The Graduate, and now I want to watch it in full again to see how everyone's insight stacks up.

    And I can't wait till next - that's a movie I love: In the Heat of the Night.
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  • Dawn

    1 year ago

    Sorry I missed the live blogging.

    I wanted to add that I read that in the very last scene Dustin Hoffman had a line to say in the back of the bus, but he forgot what it was. That is why she looks at him expectantly and he can't come up with anything, then they both just ride. Nichols thought it was better that way than with the dialogue that was supposed to be there. I've always loved that scene.

    I like to think that Ben and Elaine don't stay together very long after that. She appreciates he was her catalyst to get off the fast track to misery, but then goes on and has another life. Ben builds on his one spark of initiative (or not).
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  • tina oiticica harris

    1 year ago

    I was taken abcak with the proposition, "they become their parents." I do think this film shows a segent of the sixties population such as those who worked for the USA abroad and got loaded on booze, and never took notice of the Vietnam war.
    Now I mus think this film over, after having watched it so many times.
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  • Victoria

    1 year ago

    Dawn, there's also another story about the ending: On "Inside the Actors Studio", director Mike Nichols said that the final "sobering" emotion that Benjamin and Elaine go through was because he had just been shouting at the two of them to laugh in the scene. The actors were so scared that after laughing they stopped, scared. Nichols liked it so much, he kept it.
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  • Victoria

    1 year ago

    Oops. I somehow lost the last line above - source for that is internet movie database.
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  • sophronia

    1 year ago

    I've always felt like I don't really get this movie. My parents adore it, and they are exactly the sort of people described in post 22. To me, it was just a lot of 1960s cliches, like the fetishization of innocence and the revelation that the suburbs are full of moral degenerates. Dustin Hoffman was annoying and his character, in my 1980s perspective, completely unbelievable, while Elaine is nothing more than a cipher. There's a reason why the only animated conversation between the two in the film has no sound, and it's because nobody on earth could imagine anything they would have to say to each other. I guess the appeal is that they are such blanks that everybody can project something of themselves into their situation.
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  • sophronia

    1 year ago

    It is a very well-made film, and for something with such flat characters it holds your attention throughout. But as for what it's supposed to mean, I don't have a clue.
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  • STaugustine

    1 year ago

    Shouldn't we bring Buck Henry into this conversation? (Rummages in knapsack for Ouija board).

    Failing Buck's participation, I'd like to point out that we're dealing with material, in The Graduate, that was meant to be commercial in a cashing-in-on-the-youthquake sort of way, and that entails pretty strict formal limits (no less so than with, say, Billy Jack or Bonnie and Clyde): the point of the exercise was flattering the grand self-perceptions of postWar youth. And flattery is usually heavy on the bullsh*t.

    Anyway, as far as Nichols' comment goes, isn't it more likely that Elaine and Ben became their grandparents, instead? That's what *I* did.

    For a wittier, less bullsh*tty take on everything from the generation gap to infidelity to adulthood as a Faustian pact (with cinema's greatest sustained satirical riff on anti-Semitism thrown in on top of it), I'd put more energy into unearthing Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, which came out just a year after The Graduate, and featured far swingier actors.

    Oh, and btw:

    http://staugustinian.wordpress.com/category/why...
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  • Rosie

    1 year ago

    "Maybe after their divorce they would have individually turned to other things–Est, fundamentalist Christianity, or scientology…–which also would have left them unfulfilled."


    How do you know that? How do you know any of these religions would have left Ben and Elaine unfulfilled?
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