Although the Dodgers were playing the Yankees on Sunday night baseball, a likely preview of the World Series, I saw, skimming through the channels, that TCM was showing The Graduate, and I hit on it right at the seduction scene upstairs in the Robinson home after the graduation party at the Braddocks'. "Haven't you ever seen a woman in a slip before, Benjamin?" Not going to be changing channels now! I just looked it up and Anne Bancroft was 35 when she played Mrs Robinson. Dustin Hoffman was 29. One of his lines, when he's nervously babbling, is, "Oh, no, Mrs. Robinson, I think you're the most attractive of all my parents' friends."
I remember thinking it was about the best movie ever when I first saw it in 1970-something, but now, not so sure. Isn't the satire misaimed? The good person (Benjamin) wants to do exactly what the bad people (his parents and their shallow friends) want him to do (marry Elaine Robinson). Yes, Elaine is pretty, but by the movie's own take on things he should, if he's so restlessly decent, want something better than to marry his dad's business partner's conventional daughter who is attending UC-Berkeley. She said Yes to Carl Smith, the medical student, after all. Like, what is Benjamin rejecting? The movie casts Mrs Robinson as a villain but she's the one who's rejected what it seems to think needs rejecting.
And what's with all the water—the rainy weather and aquariums and swimming pools and San Francisco Bay? I do like the weird scene in which, on his 21st birthday, Benjamin escapes the party guests, the affluent and middle-aged southern California gargoyles who belong to his parents' social set, by sinking to the bottom of the backyard swimming pool in full scuba gear. You can see, off to the side as he lays there, the railing and three or so of the pool ladder's built-in underwater steps. The sound of chattering human voices is replaced by the gurgling of the scuba equipment in the domestic swimming pool. That's kind of effective, but most of the watery scenes seem to me pretentious. The camera pans back as Benjamin, speeding along in his convertible on a clear day, drives across San Francisco Bay. He's not just going to Berkeley, he's crossing, going to the other side, making a new life, and maybe there should be a chyron crawling across the screen announcing, Symbolism, Symbolism, Symbolism. It was 1967, you punctured holes in the top of your beer can with the other end of the bottle opener, there were pay phones in the lobby of the hotel Bobby Kennedy would be murdered in next year, and you didn't have Siri to keep you east of the Bay while driving to Berkeley from L.A.
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