50 Years Later, 'The Graduate' Still Speaks To Everyone – By Saying Nothing

When The Graduate opened in theaters on December 22, 1967, it was quickly branded a generation-defining movie. Twentysomething audiences responded rapturously to the movie's portrayal of postgrad malaise and uncertainty, as well as its firm rejection of their parents' suburban ambitions. (Why get married and get a job in "plastics" when you can run out of the wedding chapel and onto a school bus heading literally anywhere else?) The Graduate became a surprise box office blockbuster that year and launched the career of its young star, Dustin Hoffman.But baby boomers weren't the only ones to claim Benjamin Braddock as their own. The Graduate director Mike Nichols and screenwriter Buck Henry identified with Ben, even though they were approaching 40. Gen X and millennial moviegoers have also connected with the story in subsequent decades, lending the 50-year-old movie a certain timelessness. How has The Graduate managed to speak to so many people? In the new book Seduced by Mrs. Robinson, author Beverly Gray argues that The Graduate achieved this universal, classic status by deliberately avoiding a major topic of its era: the turbulent politics of the late 1960s.

Another interesting anecdote from Gray's book concerns the production team's failed attempts to film on the UC Berkeley campus. Berkeley is significant to the Graduate script. It's where the object of Ben's affections, Elaine Robinson, attends college and it's also where he attempts to win her back after she discovers his affair with her mother.Nichols lobbied hard for permission to shoot on the actual campus. According to Gray, he even roped in a Paramount executive and former alum to sweet talk the school chancellor. This exec apparently referenced student unrest on campus as part of his pitch. "The intended beauty of color photography would place the University in a better light contrasted with the hours of newsreels recording only Sather Gate Plaza," he wrote in a letter that Gray cites. "Berkeley would appear as the stable, respectable, educational community it is."These references to the Free Speech Movement demonstrations that dominated the campus in 1964 did not sway the chancellor. Nichols had to use the University of Southern California as a Berkeley stand-in instead. One of the film's few nods to student protests actually occurs at this faux Berkeley. When Ben seeks a room at a boarding house near the campus, the landlord asks if he's "one of those outside agitators." Luckily, Ben isn't, because the landlord "won't stand for it."Although The Graduate would receive near universal acclaim from film critics in 1967, this skittishness around — and, in the case of Berkeley, exploitation of — youth in revolt would earn it some detractors. One turned out to be the most influential critic of her time.

If The Graduate was reluctant to embrace issues plaguing the class of 1967, what did a movie that wasn't reluctant look like? Kael likely would have pointed to Bonnie and Clyde, which was released four months before The Graduate. Kael led the charge in championing Bonnie and Clyde as the face of New Hollywood. She praised its revolutionary use of violence and the subsequent discomfort it caused for audiences. Kael also argued that the movie was, crucially, "contemporary in feeling," that it was articulating long-held but seldom-expressed thoughts. She even managed to reference the Vietnam draft when praising Bonnie and Clyde's pointed use of 1930s nostalgia, writing, "In the American experience, the miseries of the Depression are funny in the way that the Army is funny to draftees — a shared catastrophe, a leveling, forming part of our common background."There's also In the Heat of the Night, the film that cost The Graduate several Oscars and its original DP. The movie arrived in the middle of the civil rights movement and featured a scene where a white man slaps Detective Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) only to get slapped right back. This and other scenes were so provocative for the time that, in order to get the movie greenlit, producer Walter Mirisch had to prove the film would still make money even if it didn't open in any Southern cities. Poitier was also keenly aware of the movie's potency. He initially refused to film anywhere below the Mason-Dixon line, only reluctantly agreeing to limited shoots in Tennessee.But interestingly, The Graduate's own production designer, Richard Sylbert, offered up a totally different movie from DP Haskell Wexler for comparison. Gray notes that Sylbert believed The Graduate was revolutionary in its own way. In an interview with Wide Angle, Sylbert said he viewed Ben as a "passive version" of the revolt he saw in the 1960s. But when pressed for a movie that portrayed a more active version of that revolt, he mentioned Medium Cool. Wexler didn't just do the cinematography for this 1969 film; he also wrote and directed it. It's a blend of documentary footage and fictionalized story concerning the 1968 Democratic National Convention, one that literally captures youthful protesters rioting in the streets. Wexler, a liberal activist and antiwar veteran, saw the movie as his opportunity to capture "all the ferment that was going on at that time."Another example is Easy Rider, which opened not quite two years after The Graduate. Easy Rider was seen as a true counterculture movie, one so open about drug use that the actors supposedly smoked real weed on film. It featured aimless bikers, hippie communes, brothels, violence, and literal explosions. Gray notes that some UCLA grads of the era preferred it over The Graduate for showing "how society judges based on not who you are but how you are."