When you graduate from college, your friends and family ask the same question: “What will you do with your life now?” Some people have jobs lined up and others are still trying to figure things out. Mike Nichols’ The Graduate, with its themes of disillusioned youth, the old generation vs. the new, and the search for the meaning of life, still resonates today.
The making of The Graduate
One of the reasons why The Graduate was considered groundbreaking was because of its underdog beginnings. Its director, Mike Nichols, was a theater director who won Tony Awards for Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple. Then, he was asked by Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Warner Bros. to direct the stage adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? revolutionary for its profanity and sexual innuendo not often seen in 1960s cinema.
Even though Nichols was still considered unknown in Hollywood, he was asked by producer Lawrence Turman to direct The Graduate. However, the movie kept getting turned down due to financing issues. Turman asked producer Joseph E. Levine if he could finance the movie and he agreed after he heard Nichols was asked by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to direct them in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Another newbie to head the project was Buck Henry who had no writing background and was only known for improvised comedy. But, Nichols had faith that Henry pull it off.
Dustin Hoffman’s initial film debut would have been Mel Brook’s The Producers, but Hoffman begged Brooks to let him out of the film so he could audition for Nichols’ The Graduate. Brooks didn’t think that Hoffman was going to get the part, so he let him audition. Hoffman’s audition entailed doing a love scene with Katharine Ross who would play Elaine, Benjamin’s love interest and the daughter of the woman he has an affair with. Just shy of his 30th birthday, Levine thought that Hoffman was “one of the messenger boys.” But his awkwardness wowed everyone at the audition and he nailed the part.
The legacy of The Graduate
Mike Nichols uses tightly claustrophobic shots to make audiences feel just as suffocated as the character of Benjamin does. He also did something unprecedented at the time: using popular soundtrack music as the score from Simon & Garfunkel, songs such as "Mrs. Robinson" and "The Sound of Silence." These filmmaking techniques established The Graduate as a revolutionary piece of cinema that changed the way movies were made.
In a way, you can say that The Graduate is an educational film, one that teaches students about life in the 1960s and how it is not entirely different from today. According to Digital History, 1960s youth were skeptical about bureaucratic authority and yearned for instant gratification. While their parents had to deal with the hardships of the Great Depression and World War II, young people in the 1960s were on a journey of personal enlightenment that dismissed their parents' bourgeois ideals of success.
The Graduate ended up being the highest-grossing film of 1967 making $104.9 million in North American box office earnings. It received seven nominations at the Oscars, winning Best Director.
How does The Graduate end?
The final scene in The Graduate when Benjamin steals Elaine, the newly-wedded bride, away from her wedding against a stampede of angry adults encapsulates the film’s theme of intergenerational conflict. Since Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin are from different generations, they have nothing to talk about, but he does learn that she only married Mr. Robinson because she was married out of wedlock. Mrs. Robinson doesn't want Elaine to go through the same things she did, and that's why she wants her to marry the handsome medical student.
Benjamin disrupts the wedding by frantically calling out Elaine’s name at the top of the church. Elaine defies her angry new husband, parents, and other adults by running off with Benjamin. That’s why it’s very important that when Mrs. Robinson tells Elaine it’s too late, Elaine responds, “Not for me.” Elaine and Benjamin’s act of defiance could be seen as a romantic Hollywood gesture of two people in love starting a new life together. However, in the final shot, we see the blank, confused faces of the young couple. Did they make the right decision? Are they in love? Was angering their parents worth it? Their blank look indicates how generational cycles continue despite trying to make up for their mistakes.
The Graduate is essential viewing for your public library film collection for patrons to laugh out loud and learn it’s okay not to know what direction life will take you. Academic librarians should also consider this seminal title for film studies classes.