Reviewing The Graduate in 1967, Roger Ebert gave the movie four stars, which seemed appropriate, given all the nominations and awards received by this movie. In 1997, however, Ebert gave the movie only three stars, while reflecting on how his appreciation of it had changed thirty years later.  It is commonly remarked by other critics reviewing that movie, both before and since Ebert’s revision, that the movie is dated.

Though it is regrettable that a movie that seemed so good when first released is now dated, yet such a characterization does invite us to ask why this is so.  I suppose we might begin by noting that what it means to be a college graduate today is not the same as it was back then.

There is a scene in the movie where Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is in bed in a hotel room with Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), the older, married woman with whom he has been having an affair.  They have been having sex for some time, but without conversation, other than the minimum necessary to make arrangements.  Finally, Benjamin expresses a desire to get to know her better, insisting that they have a conversation and that she pick the topic.  Impatient with the whole business, she suggests art, but then denies having any interest in the subject.  Benjamin keeps at it, finally asking her what her major was in college. She says, “Art.”  This is funny, in a sad sort of way, for as Benjamin concludes, “I guess you kind of lost interest in it over the years then.”

There was more freedom for students to major in what interested them in those days, without undue concern for whether they were being practical.  Back then, the mere existence of a college degree, even if the major was one of the liberal or fine arts, proved that one had ability.  While many students were practical right from the start of their freshman year, others felt no need to be so.  I drifted from one major to another, trying to find something that suited my fancy, until I finally settled on philosophy.  My best friend majored in psychology, and I had a girlfriend who majored in French. There was the sense that once you had a college degree, you had it made.

Although Mrs. Robinson never had to work for a living, her pregnancy having forced her to get married and occupy the housewife role, her sex would have been more of an obstacle to finding employment than her major, given that she would presumably have been in college in the late 1940s.

As for Benjamin, we don’t know what he majored in.  We learn that he was on the track team, that he edited the college newspaper, and that he received the Helpingham Award, whatever that is, but nothing is said about his major.  This omission is a little strange, but not much.  As noted above, what really counted back then was the fact that one was a college graduate.  When Mr. McGuire dramatically tells Benjamin that he has just one word to say to him, which turns out to be “Plastics,” suggesting that he seek employment in this field, someone watching this movie for the first time today might be excused for wondering if Benjamin had a degree in chemistry. Otherwise, what would qualify him for getting a job with a corporation for which plastics is an important product? But that would not have been necessary back then.  Even if Benjamin had a Bachelor of Arts, that would not have prevented him from going to work for Plastics, Inc.

In short, the title of this movie had a significance in 1967 that it would not have today.  If The Graduate had never been made, and someone produced a movie with that title today, I would anticipate a story about a recent graduate struggling to find a job where he could make enough money to pay off his student debt.

It has often been said that the Baby Boom generation, beginning with those born in 1946, had a tremendous influence as they moved through life.  The oldest members of that generation, of which I am one, were just one year away from graduating when this movie came out.  As such, this movie had a meaning for us that was especially relevant.  Needless to say, we all identified with Benjamin.

With Mrs. Robinson, we can understand how she has lost interest in art over the years.  Having to get married on account of being pregnant, being a housewife, married to a man she no longer loves, if she ever did, would naturally sap the enthusiasms of her youth.  With Benjamin, he’s already there. We don’t find out what he majored in because we can’t imagine his being enthusiastic about anything.  But at least he was comfortable being a student.  Now that he has graduated, the world is starting to become real for him.  He just wants to be alone in his room while he worries about his future.  In other words, it’s time for him to go out and get a job, but he doesn’t want to do that.

Actually, the real future that someone like Benjamin would have had to worry about back then was being drafted.  Having used up his college deferment, he would have had to face the prospect of being inducted into the Army.  From watching this movie, however, you would never know that there had been such a thing as the Vietnam War.  Paradoxically, this is one way in which the passage of time works in this movie’s favor.  Someone watching this movie today might not notice the way it overlooked the threat that war posed for anyone graduating in 1967.  For those of us watching it when it first came out, dreading the possibility of being killed or maimed in a pointless war, this was a glaring omission.

Mr. Braddock, Benjamin’s father, is played by William Daniels, who often plays a character that must have things exactly his way, according to his rigid schedule, as in A Thousand Clowns (1965) and Two for the Road (1967), so he is perfect for his part here. Without consulting Benjamin, he arranges a party for his homecoming and later insists that he demonstrate a scuba-diving outfit that Benjamin never wanted. However, there is a simple solution for all that.  All Benjamin needs to do is get a job and move into his own apartment.  But he would rather stay in his room and worry about his future.

Roger Ebert was not a member of the Baby Boom generation, having been born in 1942, but he would still have been a young man when this movie came out, as were a lot of the critics that now say this movie is dated.  Being young, there would be a tendency for them to sympathize with Benjamin, as opposed to the older people in this movie.  That Benjamin’s parents are pushy to the point of being caricatures was not recognized as such back then.  But as Ebert and other critics have aged, they have begun to lose patience with Benjamin.

While at the homecoming party, Mrs. Robinson coerces a reluctant Benjamin into giving her a ride home.  Once there, after some heavy flirtation on her part, she gets completely naked and tells him she is available for sex.  It scares Benjamin away, but after thinking about her naked body for a while, he calls her up, and they meet at a hotel, where they get a room.  He is so nervous and awkward that she asks if it is his first time.  He bristles at her suggestion that he might feel inadequate and be afraid, which spurs him to action.  Well, different things work for different people. I hate to think how inadequate I might have been in his situation.  In any event, we can’t help but agree with Mrs. Robinson that this really is his first time.

On the night they had that discussion about art and how she had to get married because she was pregnant with her daughter Elaine (Katherine Ross), Mrs. Robinson becomes furious at the mere suggestion that Benjamin might ask Elaine out when she comes home from Berkeley.  Seeing her reaction, he promises he won’t.  Unfortunately, his parents, and even Mr. Robinson, put pressure on him to ask her out. So, he does.  He promises an angry Mrs. Robinson that he will take Elaine out to dinner, have a drink, and bring her back home.

But he doesn’t.  Instead, he drives recklessly, making Elaine nervous, until they get to a strip club. When they get there, he walks in front of her as she struggles to keep up. When they are shown to a table, he sits down without getting her seated first.  Then, as she stands there, he says, “Sit down.” He smokes a cigarette while wearing sunglasses in the darkly lit club. He reminds me of the obnoxious Buddy Love in The Nutty Professor (1963), and his taking her to this strip joint reminds me of Robert De Niro taking Cybill Shepherd to a porno movie theater in Taxi Driver (1976).  When the woman doing the striptease twirls some tassels around that are attached to her nipple pasties, Benjamin asks Elaine if she can do that.  What kind of creep would do this to a girl?

And it is as unnecessary as it is crude.  He could have taken her to dinner and spent a pleasant evening with her, chatting about one thing or another.  He wouldn’t have had to ask her out again.  Nor would she have felt slighted, for she soon returns to Berkeley where she already has a boyfriend.

Anyway, he finally realizes that he has overdone it when the tassels are being twirled around right over Elaine’s head.  They leave the place, and he starts apologizing for his behavior.  After they spend some more time together, on what would now seem to be a normal date, he tells her, “You’re … the first person I could stand to be with.”

Seriously?  Except for her, there has never been anyone in his entire life that he could stand to be with?  The movie would have us take that as an indication that she is the right woman for him, soon to be the love of his life.  Instead, it made me think of “The Parable of the Two Villages.”  If this were real life, Elaine should never go out with him again, for if she did, she would eventually become the next person he cannot stand to be with.

Nevertheless, she agrees to see him again the next day.  When Mrs. Robinson finds out, she threatens to tell Elaine all about her affair with Benjamin.  He manages to tell Elaine first, but it is no good.  Elaine never wants to see him again.

After sitting alone in his room for a while, Benjamin decides to go to Berkeley, where Elaine is still taking classes, determined to marry her.  When I saw this movie in 1967, I accepted this, possibly because men did stuff like that in the movies.  It was an indication of how much he loved her.  Back then, if a man in a movie truly loved a woman, that settled it.  She was supposed to accept his love, and if she did not, she was wrongheaded.

Now, it’s one thing to watch an old movie and note with amusement that what was acceptable back then no longer is so, perhaps even smiling when we see people smoking in public places.  But when I watched this movie again recently, the way Benjamin stalks Elaine made my flesh crawl. Moreover, when he persists in sexually harassing her, he does so in a loud voice while other people are around, thereby humiliating her.

To up the melodrama, Mr. Robinson now knows about the affair and is getting a divorce.  He is also determined not to let Benjamin get anywhere near Elaine, having pulled her out of school.  Benjamin breaks into the Robinson house looking for Elaine, finding only Mrs. Robinson, who calls the police, reporting what she calls a “burglary,” but is really a home invasion.  He runs off when he hears the police car driving up.

Elaine has agreed to marry a guy named Carl, who smokes a pipe.  (When a young man in a movie smokes a pipe, that should give us pause.)  Benjamin asks Carl’s fraternity brothers where the wedding is to take place.  They all kid around about it being a shotgun wedding, about Carl’s being the Make Out King, with one guy saying to tell Carl to “save of piece for me,” then adding, “of the wedding cake.”

As a general rule, if someone in a movie belongs to a fraternity, we are not supposed to like him. (We have no doubt that Benjamin never joined a fraternity.) In addition, this locker-room talk is supposed to make us dislike Carl, but as the lesser of two evils, she would be better off with him than with Benjamin. Much better would be for her not to marry either one of them, but that possibility never occurs to her because when this movie was made, women were supposed to get married to somebody.  If this movie were made today, she would be free to remain single, and we would be happy if she did so.

Benjamin gets enough information to get him on his way to Santa Barbara, but he has to stop at a filling station to make a phone call to Carl’s father to find out which church it is that will be having the ceremony.  In searching through the phonebook to get the number, he tears out several pages that are in his way. Perhaps this is not as bad as the other stuff he has already done, but it does reinforce just how inconsiderate he is.

After this there comes the classic scene at the church.  Benjamin arrives right after Carl and Elaine have been pronounced man and wife.  He beats on the glass until she realizes that Benjamin is the man she really loves and runs off with him, Benjamin using a cross to lock people in the church.

Mrs. Robinson is furious, so I doubt she’ll be dropping the charge of burglary she has already filed against Benjamin.  And I’m sure that locking people in a building against their will must be a crime of some sort, so that charge will be added as well, probably by Elaine’s husband.

Benjamin and Elaine get on a bus, and we see the two of them with alternating looks of happiness and doubt, already having second thoughts.  It is obvious what misgivings Elaine might be having.  As for Benjamin, it is probably dawning on him that he will now have to go out and get a job, once he gets out of jail, that is.  It will probably be something in plastics.