From the NYTimes archive

[ChrisT]

THE GRADUATE

 

By BOSLEY CROWTHER

Published: December 22, 1967

 

Suddenly, here toward the year's end, when the new films are plunging toward the wire and the prospects of an Oscar-worthy long shot coming through get progressively more dim, there sweeps ahead a film that is not only one  of the best of the year, but also one of the best seriocomic social satires we've had from Hollywood since Preston Sturges was making them.

 

 

It is Mike Nichols's and Lawrence Turman's devastating and uproarious The Graduate, which came yesterday to the Lincoln Art and the Coronet.

 

 

Mark it right down in your datebook as a picture you'll have to see—and maybe see twice to savor all its sharp satiric wit and cinematic treats. For in telling a pungent story of the sudden confusions and dismays of a bland young man fresh out of college who is plunged headlong into the intellectual vacuum of his affluent parents' circle of friends, it fashions a scarifying picture of the raw vulgarity of the swimming-pool rich, and it does so with a lively and exciting expressiveness through vivid cinema.

 

 

Further, it offers an image of silver-spooned, bewildered youth, standing expectantly out with misgiving where the brook and the swimming-pool meet, that is developed so wistfully and winningly by Dustin Hoffman, an amazing new young star, that it makes you feel a little tearful and choked-up while it is making you laugh yourself raw.

 

 

In outline, it may sound skimpy and perhaps a little crude—possibly even salacious in a manner now common in films. For all it is, in essence, is the story of this bright but reticent young man who returns from an Eastern college to his parent's swanky home in Beverly Hills, gets seduced rather quickly by the restless wife of his father's law partner, then falls in love with the lady's daughter and finds himself helplessly trapped in a rather sticky dilemma until he is able to dislodge himself through a familiar romantic ploy.

 

 

That's all. And yet in pursuing this simple story line,  which has been adorned with delicious incidents and crackling dialogue in the screenplay by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry, based on a novel by Charles Webb, the still exploring Mr. Nichols has done such sly and surprising things with his actors and with his camera—or, rather, Robert Surtees's camera—that the overall picture has the quality of a very extensive and revealing social scan.

 

 

With Mr. Hoffman's stolid, deadpanned performance, he gets a wonderfully compassionate sense of the ironic and pathetic immaturity of a mere baccalaureate scholar turned loose in an immature society. He is a character very much reminiscent of Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.

 

 

And with Anne Bancroft's sullenly contemptuous and voracious performance as the older woman who yearns for youth, Mr. Nichols has twined in the netting the casual crudeness and yet the pathos of this type.

 

 

Katharine Ross, another comparative newcomer, is beautifully fluid and true as the typical college-senior daughter whose sensitivities are helplessly exposed for brutal abrasion by her parents and by the permissive society in which she lives. Murray Hamilton is piercing as her father—a seemingly self-indulgent type who is sharply revealed as bewildered and wounded in one fine, funny scene. And William Daniels and Elizabeth Wilson fairly set your teeth on edge as the hotcha, insensitive parents of the lonely young man.

 

 

Enhancing the veracity of the picture is first-rate staging in true locations and on well-dressed sets, all looking right in excellent color. And a rich, poignant musical score that features dandy modern folk music, sung (offscreen, of course) by the team of Simon and Garfunkel, has the sound of today's moody youngsters—"The Sounds of Silence," as one lyric says.

 

 

Funny, outrageous, and touching, The Graduate is a sophisticated film that puts Mr. Nichols and his associates on a level with any of the best satirists working abroad today.

[cj001f]

Morgan Fairchild coming to PDX soon

[ChrisT]

don't be daft

[cj001f]

don't be daft

Anne Bancroft scares me a little bit these days

 

I'm not even sure I'd play Butch to Elaine's Etta