“Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you …” - Simon and Garfunkel, from The Graduate

On the surface, 1967’s The Graduate appears to be a bitter-bittersweet love story. Who can forget Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) burning the Pacific Coast Highway in his red Ferrari, trying to get to the church to stop his true love from marrying a guy she can barely tolerate? Who can forget the iconic moment when he cries, “ELAINE … ELAINE … ELAINE!” at the locked church door while she seals her vows inside? It is a heartbreaking moment. 

The Graduate is more than a love story. It is a story about youth, rebellion and unease with nouveau riche America’s suburban status quo. And it is still more than that. At its heart, it is a story about America’s loss of heroes. This is what makes it resonate today and sets The Graduate apart from earlier movies like The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause. In those films, there was at least one adult to respect; at least one person to look up to; one person to inspire, one who led by example. Benjamin Braddock has no one.

As the song “Mrs. Robinson” says, Joe DiMaggio, American icon, baseball legend, hero to millions, The Yankee Clipper, Joltin’ Joe himself really “has left and gone away”.

Benjamin has a college degree and honors, but he has no friends, no sweetheart, no teachers to inspire him, no heroes, and no adults who give him worthwhile guidance. Even his own mother and father mouth plaid suburban banalities while showering him with expensive toys and parading him around the patio and swimming pool like a prize bull for their friends to admire. Benjamin is disoriented, floundering in confusion and just plain scared of what may or may not lie ahead. He is at a dead end, but he doesn’t understand what it is or why he is there.

Like many others, he turns to self-destructive behavior to try to find something to anchor his life. In Benjamin’s case, it isn’t drugs, communes or radical politics to which he turns. He throws himself into a tawdry and emotionless affair with Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), a friend of the family who is old enough to be his mother.
Like all acts of self-destruction, things sour quickly. In short time, it becomes clear to both they are only using one another for physical gratification to try to fill some unrecognized hole inside. The affair shatters into a million pieces when, Mr. Robinson forces Benjamin into taking his visiting daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross), out on the town to show her a good time. Benjamin does his best to sabotage the date, but it backfires and he and Elaine ultimately fall in love. True love. The real deal. Mrs. Robinson is furious and … well, things get ugly after that.

If The Graduate sounds bleak, it isn’t. It is a droll and funny social satire and one with a healthy share of laughs, most of which come from Benjamin’s early ineptitude at romance, i.e. sex. Don Juan he ain’t. Although Hoffman’s face remains frozen in a mask of bland, his eyes flash sheer panic when the clerk at the hotel he has selected for the tryst asks, “Are you here for an affair?” Naturally, the clerk really means a social affair.
That The Graduate is funny shouldn’t be a surprise. It was written by Buck Henry (Get Smart!, Saturday Night Live) and directed by Mike Nichols, who helped found Chicago’s legendary Second City improvisational comedy group. He then went on to become one half of Nichols and May, a groundbreaking comedy team of the early 1960s. What is surprising is that The Graduate is only Nichols’ second movie. It won him an Oscar, too.

Hoffman is superb as The Graduate and the movie, justifiably, made him a star. As Mrs. Robinson, Anne Bancroft gives a haunting performance that is all fire and ice, lust and self-loathing, calculated wickedness and tragic pathos. Mrs. Robinson does horrible things, but one can actually find pity for her. She is one of life’s tragic walking casualties.

The Graduate is a landmark film that kicked off a new Hollywood golden age in which studios turned out one stylish classic after another. To follow were Midnight Cowboy, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, M*A*S*H, A Clockwork Orange, American Graffiti, The Godfather and Cabaret, to name a mere fraction. For younger audiences, The Graduate is also an eye-opening time capsule. Nehru suits, hippies, flower power, psychedelics, sideburns and protest marches be damned. The Graduate is what most of 1967 really looked like and what it was really all about.

What happens to Benjamin? Not to spoil the ending, but Benjamin finally does find a hero. Funny thing. It happens to be him.

The Graduate is available on DVD from MGM Home Video and is presented in digitally-restored Dolby sound and 16x9 widescreen format.