In the holiday whirl you may have missed something. I knew I did. That’s why I got a wake-up call when I read Lisa Schwarzbaum’s piece that reminded me that the movie, The Graduate, was 50 years old last month!
For baby-boomers and perhaps others, this was a generational movie. One that signaled the end of an old era and the beginning of a new one. I’d held that belief for decades – five to be exact – and Schwarzbaum’s book review solidified that belief.
She reviewed Beverly Gray’s book: “Seduced by Mrs. Robinson: How ‘The Graduate” Became the Touchstone of a Generation.” The title of the book spoke precisely to how I felt about the movie.
While Schwarzbaum’s book review had some issues with Gray’s book, her review did highlight what made the movie so iconic. Here is part of what she said:
A half-century has passed since the bewildered college graduate Benjamin Braddock, played with star-making originality by a then largely unknown Dustin Hoffman, floated, directionless, in his parents’ glassy Beverly Hills pool, and was told (by someone of his Parents’ Generation) that the future lay in “plastics.” It has been a half-century since Anne Bancroft smoldered as the seductive Mrs. Robinson, an unhappy woman who was the opposite of bewildered — an adult mature enough to know she was trapped in the hell of plastic marital conventions. It has been 50 years since Hoffman, Bancroft and the incandescently creative team of the director Mike Nichols and the screenwriter Buck Henry took Charles Webb’s small 1963 novel of domestic discontents and turned it into a movie that epitomized huge shifts in both popular culture and Hollywood commerce.