That's who the landlord was referring to. The Graduate 's version of Southern California is focused on the rich, preppy areas. We don't really see a broader cross-section of L. Ben's father is an attorney who can afford to buy Ben an expensive sports car for a graduation gift. His male friends are professional people and their wives are traditional housewives.
The character of Mrs. Robinson shows us the underside of this glittering life; the price she paid for being the wife of a wealthy attorney was the abandonment of her own dreams and interests. Even though the film spends some time on the Berkeley campus, there are no signs of hippies or banners or political demonstrations, which would have probably been going on daily in Ben and Elaine, although they're planning their own personal rebellion, don't identify with that.
There's a shot of Ben on an empty campus, sitting under an American flag. But he's not there for a revolution; he's got no real plan except to somehow find Elaine and convince her to marry him. Parents Home Homeschool College Resources. Robinson seducing an angst-filled Dustin Hoffman, still survives in this free-thinking college town in which parts of the movie were filmed. To mark the anniversary, the Berkeley Historical Society is offering a walking tour Nov.
Steve Finacom, a past president of the society, will guide the tour. He said interest is strong and more tours might be added. Berkeley did really capture the attention of the nation in that era. I recently spent a long weekend in Berkeley on my own self-guided tour into cinematic history. I also wanted to learn more about Berkeley, a city of about , people just north of Oakland and across the bay from San Francisco. It's known as a boisterous epicenter of left-wing political activism.
Appropriately, I stayed at The Graduate Hotel, which made a brief appearance in the movie and is one block from the University of California-Berkeley campus. Known as the Hotel Durant when the movie was filmed, it became The Graduate last summer when it was acquired by a company that owns a chain of 10 hotels in university communities around the country. This is where a crotchety landlord played by Norman Fell who later starred as Mr.
Robinson drove in toward him and grabbed him around the waist. Benjamin twisted away, but before he could reach Elaine he felt Mr. Robinson grabbing at his neck and then grabbing at the collar of his shirt and pulling him backward and ripping the shirt down his back.
He spun around and slammed his fist into Mr. Robinson reeled backward and crumpled into a corner. Nichols has muted the smash to the face into an elbow to the solar plexus, but Mr. Robinson still lands senseless on the floor, and the scene begins to build to an Oedipal jubilee. If Benjamin could have handled the situation in any other way, or if he had really injured Mr.
Robinson or had killed him , Nichols might have led his young audiences to feel the guilt that lies just beyond, and sometimes mingles with, triumph. Benjamin arrives after —instead of, as in the novel and in previous films, before—the ceremony is over. Marry me! We know what is real! Then Nichols craftily steps outside the convention.
Where Morgan hurts and humiliates no one but himself, Benjamin, like an Ivy League Douglas Fairbanks, outmaneuvers and routs the hostile wedding party. And when he starts swinging the cross like a battle-axe they go wild. Like Benjamin, he would have to have no choice but the ordinarily forbidden. When they finally escape their tormentors, and the tension of the chase is relaxed, our relief is consummate. They stare blankly ahead, because at last things have stopped happening at a preoccupying clip.
Now they have a chance to consider the momentous consequences of what they have done, and the difficulties that lie ahead. This final moment of thoughtfulness—Nichols has painstakingly established the use of full-screen expressionless faces to indicate thought and emotion—lessens only slightly the exuberant tone of his finale. What, after all, is Benjamin going to do with his life?
Do we infer from the vigor of his pursuit, and from the conventionality of Elaine, that they will soon be discussing a mortgage on a split-level in Tarzana? Or are these clues illusory? Will Benjamin now, with Elaine in tow, return to grapple with the confusions that unsettled him before the Robinson ladies turned up?
Indeed, Nichols recently told a group of college-newspaper editors that as the movie ends, the real problems are just beginning we must assume that Benjamin somehow needed Elaine before he could face them , and that the marriage would never work out. At worst, he has fixed upon her as a distraction, exactly as he fixed upon her mother.
The condition of being altogether lost may be unbearable; it is understandable that people usually take false roads out. For an artist to detour onto such roads is also understandable, I suppose; in any event, it happens often enough. Resisting the lure of such detours and remaining still, in stark perplexity, to watch and listen is the nerviest course, in art as in life. The artist cannot afford to let himself get away with things; if he does, he cheats his characters and, consequently, his audience.
If he cannot long maintain himself in the condition of being lost, he cannot long maintain his characters in that condition, either, because he has no sure sense of where it leads, or even of what its resolution might look like.
Though we all identify European movies by naming their directors, film buffs who refer to American movies that way have seemed a little pedantic. In fact, it has given everybody the chance to be a movie buff; that is, to talk about the director. Even its actors, in interviews, have tried to turn attention away from the themselves toward Nichols. Many of them called him a genius. Nichols, as a director whose sure control shapes and colors every frame of film with a distinctive, recognizable style, is almost sure of election.
Nichols is everywhere, blending, coloring, illuminating. Hey, there, Schlesinger, Richardson, Antonioni, Truffaut. You bet. They must truly be ignored. Americans want to feel good about what is being produced here.
A century later, when American movie pioneers set the pace for the international field, the heirs of those critics were quick to claim cinema as a fully legitimate medium for art. At least since the end of the Second World War, with the flourishing of Italian neo-realism and, later, the French nouvelle vague , American entertainment has been forced back into the shadow of European art.
Oppressed by the confusions of the times, we look for the film genius who will do for us what Rossellini, Visconti, De Sica, Fellini, Antonioni, and Olmi have done for the Italians.
It is an immense task, granted, but we cannot afford to accept less from our first mid-century genius. He must give this frazzled country some feeling for itself, for its contradictions and despairs, even as it goes through changes that make the job almost impossible. Not altogether unlike Benjamin, Nichols has long existed on the verge, in a portentous condition of promise.
He had a way of shrugging off his unbroken string of successes five stage and two Hollywood hits out of seven tries which made them appear playful warmups for some grand feat of art. Nichols has provided his film with the texture, if not the substance, of contemporaneity. Nichols is reported to have salted his crowd with casting-agency hippies.
He evidently has an exceptional eye for extras. Similarly, his camera has captured the exact appearance of a contingent of senior citizens, a nouveau-riche poolside lawn party, a Berkeley student boarding house, an Ivy League-type locker room, a suburban Los Angeles den. The care that Nichols has devoted to surface reality infuses into familiar personalities and their backgrounds a recognizability uncommon in American films and virtually nonexistent on television.
Nichols also seems determined to weaken the impact of his settings with an almost random series of cinematic tricks. Presumably, a director uses the perspectives of his camera its lens distortions, its angle of vision, its filter coloration, its distance, the suddenness of its attention to indicate the proper attitude toward the visual facts, more or less as a writer chooses between words to suggest his own viewpoint.
The way it works out most often in movies, of course, is that a director tosses off variations in perspective in a spirit of arbitrary virtuosity, confusing us or distracting us from his text, in the manner of a poet whose rhyme and metre bear no more than an incidental relation to the sense they serve.
We now understand that good writing can exist quite independent of such conventions—that, in fact, a careless, eclectic use of them results in bad writing. Nichols approaches his visual arrangements like a young writer stuffing incongruous stylisms of Dickens, Joyce, Faulkner, and Hemingway—and some good schtik from Salinger, Mailer, and Bruce Jay Friedman as well—into his prose.
In reading, we have a clear view of how disastrously this subverts what reality of his own a writer manages to bring to his material, but we are not so wary of the non-integral perspectives of the motion-picture camera. Nichols goes in for this sort of camerawork throughout the movie.
Does it work here? Like a child who has been given a great many presents at once, Nichols seems to have just discovered that the camera will do all sorts of remarkable stunts at his bidding. Now he has it crouching low to peer up into a dazzling blur of sunlight.
Now staring wide-eyed in to the headlights of oncoming cars so that the beams bounce from the lens, creating floating discs in the night. Now jumping into a swimming pool to catch the swirly patterns of air bubbles in moving water. Now snuggling in a closet corner and ogling out past the hangers, now squinting through a fish tank, now gazing at reflections in a polished tabletop. Now its lens is foreshortening, now it is wide-angle, now telescopic, now looking to one side so that the main image is way off center.
A cohesive point of view should lead to a legible plan that relates each shot to the film in its entirety—or, failing that, at least to the surrounding shots, to whole scenes. Nichols, fairly bursting with ambitious ideas, seems to have been squeamish about giving any of them up. Denied the cabaret option of discretionary blackouts, Nichols is frequently at a loss for some means of proceeding gracefully from one cut to the next. Often, he ducks out of his dilemma with facile irony.
How are we to account for these lapses? Once a writer has embarked upon the act of composition, he must put all the fine prose he has read out of his mind, and I suspect that a filmmaker, at some juncture—if not while shooting, then in the cutting room—must do the same with all the movie footage he has viewed admiringly. They send us scurrying in search of absent meanings.
The startling zoom-back shot of Mrs. Again the mind has been drawn in an undesirable direction. Astonishingly, Nichols seems to miss the point at times. But a conscious artist is rarely influenced in any such abstruse way. Nichols and Webb before him clearly aimed at that comedy which arises naturally out of a scrupulous observation of life—that vision of human frustration and inadequacy which is devastatingly true yet devoutly compassionate.
This is probably the highest form of comedy and, at its most successful, the funniest. Now, there can also be a certain condemnation in such laughter, but never so much as to overwhelm charity with contempt. The song that Simon and Garfunkel do on the sound track after Benjamin flees from Mrs. Robinson, Jesus loves you more than you will know. It may give exquisite pleasure over long periods without making us laugh out loud.
Then, when the side-splitters do come, they have a quality almost of spiritual purgation. How often and how loud? Robinson and persists until the end of that section when Benjamin realizes he loves Elaine : Benjamin himself becomes the butt of the jokes. In the first part of the film, adults seemed laughable, or pitiable, yet basically well intentioned.
Here they seem wicked Mrs. Having become sinister, the grownups no longer seem fit objects for comedy. Benjamin turns into a victim here—not only a victim of Mrs. It is the second victim, in particular, that we are meant to laugh at. Benjamin should be uncomfortable with Mrs. About fifteen minutes of running time elapses, for example, between the time Benjamin telephones Mrs.
Robinson and the time they hit the hotel bed together—fifteen minutes of sight and sound gags on the theme of nervousness. Benjamin fumbles through the arrangements for their rendezvous—nodding maniacally, scratching, wheezing from deep in his throat, like a frightened animal—as though he expected a vice squad to descend on him at any instant.
In some business with the room clerk that centers on his having no luggage, Benjamin loses his cool completely. We quickly exhaust our ways of receiving the joke, and our laughter becomes similarly frenetic. Critics have remarked that the excruciating exchanges between Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson are reminiscent of some of the bits that Nichols used to do with Elaine May. Their work together often portrayed men and women coming on with each other, and Nichols and May were particularly sharp at skewering common dishonesties, egotistical little games, and ulterior desperation.
Robinson—though heaven forbid we should laugh at it. Robinson becomes more than a domineering female. His compliance begins to suggest that he must despise himself. After the surprising credibility of the first third, the tight structure of plot and character begin falling to pieces. We are assaulted by a series of unbelievable details. Presumably vital questions of plot become irrelevant, because of incredible elements within the plot. After the first hotel-room scene with Mrs.
Robinson, we could equally well decide either way. If Benjamin is a virgin, we may chalk up most of his terrible distress to first-time jitters. If he is not, we must look for more interesting and disturbing causes. We could not laugh in quite the same way if we knew that Benjamin had just returned from sleeping with prostitutes on the road; we would have to treat him more seriously. We would have to interpret his reluctance to embark upon an affair with Mrs.
Robinson as more sensible and telling. As soon as Nichols starts fudging on his material, he gets caught up in a web of implausibilities. First, we have the B. Benjamin—evidently head of the debating club, campus editor, captain of the cross-country team, social chairman of his house—transformed into a somnambulistic, clowny schlepp, and, again, into an aggressive tiger.
Robinson—a handsome, worldly, unhappily married woman—is transformed first into a businesslike mistress and then in to a hellhound. Just as we begin to feel some sympathy for this wretched woman, Nichols snaps the witch mask back on her. The remarkable thing is that there is not the slightest necessity for either of these sequences of transformation.
Nothing essential to the story requires that Benjamin ever be less than bright and competent. Nor does anything demand Mrs. So Nichols has introduced these two distortions of personality as though to help captivate us away from our initial focus, and from them spring a litter of false bits.
Benjamin would not continue to call Mrs. Robinson by her surname after they have been sleeping together for weeks. He would not make such an idiot of himself over retrieving his toothbrush from his car. Robinson have been trysting.
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