The Graduate (1967): The Romantic Comedy That Stops Smiling on the Bus, and Changed Hollywood

A young man stands perfectly still on a moving walkway at the Los Angeles airport. He doesn't walk. He just lets the machine carry him while Simon & Garfunkel sing "The Sound of Silence" on the soundtrack. That's Benjamin Braddock, and that's the first image of The Graduate: a hero being delivered somewhere he never chose to go.

Nearly sixty years later, Mike Nichols' film still gets filed as a sex comedy about an older woman and a nervous kid. It's sharper than that. The Graduate is a romantic comedy that keeps watching after the happy ending, just long enough for the smiles to fail. That last stretch, on the back seat of a city bus, still hits anyone who has moved back into a childhood bedroom while the grown-ups ask about plans. It also helped crack open old Hollywood: pop songs as the score, a leading man who didn't look like one, and a young audience that showed the studios what it could earn.

Why It's a Masterpiece

Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) comes home from college with no idea what to do next. At his welcome-home party, a family friend pulls him aside and offers the one word of career advice he'll get all summer: "Plastics." Then Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), the wife of his father's law partner, asks for a ride home, and the summer becomes an affair conducted in a hotel under a fake name, until Benjamin falls for her daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross).

Once screenwriter Buck Henry's draft clicked, Nichols summed up the story as "a boy who was drowning in things, in objects, in affluence," Frank Rich recounts in his Criterion essay. The film takes it literally. Benjamin floats on a raft in his parents' pool and sinks to the bottom of it in a scuba suit. He is always under something, sealed off.

What changed the movies starts with the music. Instead of a conventional underscore, Nichols laid already-familiar Simon & Garfunkel songs over Benjamin's numb summer, and almost nowhere else, so the long dialogue scenes play in near silence, as Variety notes in its look back at the soundtrack. The soundtrack album spent nine weeks at No. 1, sold more than two million copies and won a Grammy. Every movie that drops a pop song over a montage to say what a character can't owes something to this one.

So does every actor who doesn't look like a movie star. Steven Soderbergh, talking with Nichols at a Directors Guild screening in 2003, called Hoffman's casting a watershed for guys who didn't have matinee-idol faces. The money followed: it was 1967's top-grossing film in North America, embraced by boomers even as several major critics sneered, Rich notes. Soon Easy Rider and M*A*S*H walked through the door it had propped open.

Behind the Scenes

Nobody in Hollywood wanted it. Every major studio passed, and the independent producer Joseph E. Levine paid for it instead, growing restless as the shoot ran into a fourth month. Nichols, fresh off Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, didn't want big stars.

Robert Redford wanted the part. Nichols told a DGA audience he asked Redford whether he'd ever struck out with a girl, and Redford genuinely didn't understand the question. He cast Hoffman instead, an off-Broadway actor he'd seen playing a Russian fishwife. Hoffman later told the writer Mark Harris that Nichols had it wrong: the Benjamin of Charles Webb's novel was a tall track runner, and Hoffman was Jewish, nowhere near six feet and pushing thirty. That mismatch is the performance. Listen to him blurt "Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me," then tack on a timid "Aren't you?": a kid accusing an adult and apologizing in the same breath.

Before a frame was shot, Nichols ran three weeks of rehearsals on an empty soundstage, where art director Richard Sylbert had marked out every set on the floor in masking tape. By the last week, American Cinematographer reported, the picture was planned cut by cut.

The music arrived almost by accident. Halfway through shooting, Nichols said, his brother sent him a Simon & Garfunkel record, and after four weeks of playing it nonstop he realized it was his score. The duo shrugged and said yes. When Nichols asked for something better than the new song they'd offered, they huddled in a corner and came back with a tune Paul Simon had been writing about Eleanor Roosevelt. "Mrs. Roosevelt" became "Mrs. Robinson," and they hadn't even written the verses yet.

Hidden Details You Might Have Missed

• The song is unfinished. Listen to "Mrs. Robinson" in the film: it's mostly chorus, with "deet de de de" filling in where the verses should be. The full single came out months later.
• The song runs out of gas, too. During Benjamin's frantic drive to Santa Barbara, "Mrs. Robinson" slows to a crawl and stops exactly as his red Alfa Romeo sputters dry.
• A hidden splice in the pool. The scuba scene, shot from inside Benjamin's mask, is two shots. The operator carried a dry camera wearing a face mask on rods to the pool's edge and whipped it across the water; the cut to an underwater camera hides inside that swish pan.
• The haze on the raft. For Benjamin's daydreams in the pool, cinematographer Robert Surtees pre-fogged the negative by 17 percent, so shadows go milky and the water shimmers.
• The crowd didn't know. The scene outside the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip was filmed with a hidden camera and a 500mm lens from a gas station across the street. The people on the sidewalk had no idea they were in a movie.
• Berkeley is in Los Angeles. The "Berkeley" campus exteriors were shot at USC. And the hotel clerk is screenwriter Buck Henry.

The Director's Genius Moment

Spoiler warning: This section describes the ending.

The run to the church is a joke built with a lens. Surtees shot Benjamin sprinting straight at the camera through that 500mm telephoto, which flattens distance so badly that he seems to run and run without getting any closer. Then he's pounding on a church window above the ceremony, screaming "Elaine!", and she screams "Ben!" back, and they fight their way out, and Benjamin jams the church doors shut with a cross. It's a 1930s screwball climax at full volume.

They climb aboard a bus and sit in the back, laughing, her in a wedding dress. Passengers turn to stare. Nichols holds the shot. The grins wobble. The two of them stop looking at each other and look forward instead, and "The Sound of Silence" comes back, the same song that carried Benjamin down the airport walkway at the start.

None of that was in the script, which, Nichols said, ended with people running around outside the church. With traffic stopped for miles, he told Hoffman and Ross to get on the bus and laugh, frightened them in the process, and saw their terror in the next day's dailies. "Some part of me knew better than I did," he told the DGA crowd. A comedy found its real ending in the ten seconds after the joke.

Another Way to See It

In 1997, Roger Ebert revisited the film he'd cheered thirty years earlier and switched sides. Seen again, he wrote, Benjamin was an "insufferable creep," and Mrs. Robinson was the only person in the movie who was truly alive. Bancroft was only thirty-five, less than six years older than Hoffman, and she plays a woman who sees through every room she walks into. Matt Zoller Seitz noticed that she's the only major character allowed to look straight into the camera, and when she does, it feels like she's letting us in on what she's become.

Seitz goes further, suggesting it might be less a satire than a horror film without the blood: children turning into their parents. Here's what the film does to us, honestly. It lets us believe, for two thrilling minutes, that one wild act can break you out of the life that was laid out for you. Then it sits us down next to the two kids who pulled it off and makes us watch them realize they have no idea what comes next. Anyone who has won the big argument with their family knows that bus ride. It's freedom, and it's very quiet.

Should You Watch It?

Yes, especially if you're twenty-two or have a twenty-two-year-old. It's a quick, funny 106 minutes that plays best when two generations watch together and argue afterward about who the hero is. If you want the best version, Criterion's Blu-ray offers a 4K restoration with the original mono soundtrack plus a commentary in which Nichols talks with Soderbergh. Choose the mono: the silences are part of the score.

On a rewatch, keep your eyes on the bus and count how long it takes the smiles to go. Then think back to that first shot. The movie begins with Benjamin standing still while a machine carries him forward, and it ends with him sitting still while another one does the same. For a parent's-eye view of a kid heading off toward an uncertain future, pair it with our review of One Battle After Another.