[This entry was slightly edited on 9/15/12.]
It annoys me a little when media today, such as whoever’s been given the “grandee’s seat” from which to hold forth oracularly in The New York Times, speak about actor Dustin Hoffman as if he is, and always will be, just Benjamin Braddock of The Graduate. How quickly people forget—though if the writers of such a comment, and much of its audience, were all born after The Graduate was released (as well as several of Hoffman’s other pictures), then these people had no direct experience to remember or forget anyway.
It annoys me a little when media today, such as whoever’s been given the “grandee’s seat” from which to hold forth oracularly in The New York Times, speak about actor Dustin Hoffman as if he is, and always will be, just Benjamin Braddock of The Graduate. How quickly people forget—though if the writers of such a comment, and much of its audience, were all born after The Graduate was released (as well as several of Hoffman’s other pictures), then these people had no direct experience to remember or forget anyway.
Hoffman starred in Midnight Cowboy (1969) as Ratso Rizzo, and as Carl Bernstein in the political classic All the President’s Men (1976), the weird Marathon Man (1976), and the sensitive Kramer vs. Kramer (1979; beside Meryl Streep in one of her first lauded roles; Hoffman actually coached her at one point in her performance). He later livened things up by appearing in a drag role in the (to me overly celebrated) Tootsie (1982). He even later showed he still had his virtuosity when he played an autistic savant in Rain Man (1988). This all means that he was an actor in as many notable movies, several with Oscar nominations or wins, and with as much cache as any notable actor of the 1970s and early ’80s, such as Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro.
Very recently Hoffman—at age 75—was announced as selected to receive Kennedy Center Honors along with several other achievers in the arts.
The Graduate doesn’t need much discussion. Many movie lovers, from baby boomers through younger generations, are familiar with it. If you like the movie and can obtain the 2007 DVD, which includes extras such as interviews, and optional commentary during the film by Hoffman and costar Katharine Ross, I think you will enjoy it and its many tidbits of trivia.
A rather unlikely confluence of prime movers for this film
A number of factors, seeming unlikely each by itself, joined to make this movie. Director Mike Nichols is of Russian Jewish extraction (and he was born in Germany), and had started making his name in Chicago comedy and New York stage drama. He had one movie to his name before this one, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), a screen adaptation of the Edward Albee play that stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton—definitely worth seeing if you like The Graduate, though it is different from it in important ways.
(Interestingly, Woolf uses good black-and-white cinematography and highly textured set design, and The Graduate, while shot in color, also utilizes black-and-white design motifs in various sets and costume schemes. The production designer for both films was Richard Sylbert—see my March 16 entry on The Manchurian Candidate—while Nichols and/or the cinematographer Robert Surtees held sway over aspects of the visual design in The Graduate; Hoffman in DVD comments talks several times about Surtees’ input.)
Producer Lawrence Turman had optioned the novel (in about 1963), which was by Charles Webb. Turman enticed Nichols to direct by sending him a copy of the novel. It took about a couple years between optioning and finally producing the film (Hoffman in a DVD interview makes somewhat forgetful references to there being a long process of script rewrites and/or casting difficulties). Another little item of trivia that I don’t fully understand is that this project was not a usual studio project; it seems almost to have been a sort of (before this was typical) indie project. “Embassy Pictures” is noted at the beginning as the producing firm; Joseph E. Levine, noted as a distributor by Hoffman on the DVD, seems to have represented the studio/production end of things (while Turman was more of a story-oriented producer, perhaps). The 2007 DVD package reflects that StudioCanal, a French firm, is now the distributor for the film, obviously having taken over the licensing or some ownership role. So it’s amazing (within the limits of my info here) that this classic has been a sort of orphan as far as studio ownership has been concerned.
In terms of story content, Webb meant his novel to be about materialistic, middle-class families in the late 1950s; so it was about “plastic” people of the late Eisenhower years. Then, because the film was really meant just to echo the book (according to one or more DVD commenters)—the film’s story seems rather claustrophobically middle-class-precious anyway—it makes no effort to echo specific social consciousness or news of movements of the 1960s, such as protests against the Vietnam War. Hoffman remarks on this in his during-the-film commentary, and that the only suggestion of social unrest is the landlord, played by veteran actor Norman Fell (who would later be on the TV show Three’s Company), asking Hoffman’s Ben whether he was one of “…those outside agitators.”
Hoffman speak of the ironies of his being cast, in a DVD-extra interview—he speaks about a range of details, and if this sort of thing bores you, you might find him tedious, but I think he speaks with humor and gusto allied to careful attention to the remarkable genesis of this movie. About age 30 at the time (1966), in the ~1992 interview he says he’d felt the producers were scraping the bottom of the barrel—taking a last choice—when they tried him out with a screen test. When he saw Katharine Ross, he found her so beautiful that he felt for him to be cast beside her was like “an uglier joke…a Jewish nightmare.”
A somewhat Kafkaesque quality to the story
The story in some ways is rather perverse, though many might feel it is an especially poignant one in which, after initial grossly accidental developments including his affair with an older woman, a young man falls for a young woman and pines for her until he gets her (it’s amusing that some people today look at Ben as a stalker; I’ll comment on this more below). Ben preludes his falling in love with Elaine by acceding in an affair instigated by the famous Mrs. Robinson, the wife of Ben’s father’s law-practice partner. There is a sort of incestuousness about this that seems, from a premises-designing standpoint, as if to really drive home the book’s being about “the older generation screwing the younger.”
Another point is less complimentary to the movie, perhaps. It is noted in the film’s Wikipedia article that Roger Ebert, the esteemed movie critic, has changed his assessment of The Graduate over 30 years to bring it down a few notches from its previous exalted perch. His commenting in 1997, as the Wikipedia quote has it, that he finds Benjamin “an insufferable creep” I think is anachronistic in terms of judging him by later standards when, in the 1960s, he was a sort of fictional distillation, something of a Holden Caulfield (J.D. Salinger’s character), to represent more of a poetic standard for young viewers than a realistic personality type. As another measure, when people might comment today that Ben seems like a stalker in following Elaine to her college, this ignores two things—that the whole idea of “stalker” (of females) is a modern development (in terms of the concept/allegation and the reality it refers to), and Ben’s following Elaine was more of a sort of psychological parable kind of representation than meant to be a sort of sociological study of what would be typical or respectable behavior.
To be more critical, I think today we can agree that a fair amount of this film is not-especially-groundbreaking shtick, while we can still credit Buck Henry (who cowrote the script with Calder Willingham) with his writing that was sensitive to the times (Henry had a hand in other fare such as TV’s M*A*S*H [1972-83]). But the fact that The Graduate is “shticky” overlooks an important point. This film is highly stylized, in terms of visual qualities and character traits’ being shown, but it is not a triumph of style over substance, so much. It is a way to deliver a kind of Kafkaesque “tone poem” of a distilled morality play of sorts, which treats the “generation gap,” within the “candy-coating” of esthetics that seem as shiny and privilege-soaked as the lifestyles of the families represented. We caught up by, and look beyond, the surface dazzle to identify with the suffering youth that Hoffman, in his “diamond in the rough” way, conveys.
You can still maybe see a lot of my points and still feel the film is dated. Maybe so; but this film was historically important as representing a major turning point in how the cinema addressed the tastes and concerns of young people. Maybe some other film made in the later 1960s (either that really existed or could have been done but wasn’t) could have amounted to the same watershed (and I don’t mean in the shallower, more larky style of Easy Rider [1969]). But if you look at the history of American film, nothing else stands as The Graduate does, in terms of following all the major favorites that had come before, and in terms of providing a sort of stylistic and “story angle” template for any of the typically youth-oriented movies that came after. For instance, does In the Heat of the Night (1967) seem to presage The Hunger Games (2012)? No. But does The Graduate in some way? Yes.
Ethnic qualities of the actors, especially of Hoffman
There is a lot of discussion in DVD extras, among screenwriter Buck Henry, maybe producer Turman, and/or maybe someone else that the whole idea of the story was for it to be about “surfboards”—blond, rather vapid people, doing well financially, who seemed to live for little more than surfing and other accoutrements of upper-middle-class California life. They envisioned Ronald Reagan as the father (I’m not sure if Reagan was meant to be Mr. Braddock or Mr. Robinson; the film’s Wikipedia article, quoting TCM’s host Robert Osborne, suggests Reagan was considered to play Mr. Robinson; anyway, the Mr. Braddock role went to William Daniels). Also considered were Doris Day as the mother (whose role went to Elizabeth Wilson, a stage and, later, TV actress) and Robert Redford as Ben. It seems to me to go without saying that, all his talents aside, Redford would have been no good for this role.
Anne Bancroft, an ethnic Italian who, famously, was only a few years older than Hoffman in real life, seems to have been the main or only choice, in the producers’ minds, for Mrs. Robinson. Meanwhile, Murray Hamilton, who projects a rather distinctive personality, would play Mr. Robinson; he also played the pro-business shore-town mayor in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975).
Buck Henry notes that Hoffman conveys a personality as if he was a “mutt” of a child to appear as he did (in a “surfboard” family). Another DVD commenter, I think a modern-day film director or producer, says that casting Hoffman as Ben was to put an externally (ethnically) “outsider” type within an “insider” (privileged) family to help convey that, internally, he felt he was an outsider. Regardless of how important you feel it was to be precise about portraying the marking qualities of Ben’s “insider” family, to me Hoffman was eminently qualified to be Ben, because he could pull off the finely detailed nervous/comic acting that defines Ben, in a way you couldn’t imagine Redford doing (at least not with the same flavor). Ben’s was a role for acting, not for looks.
