This Wednesday we continue our feature where we revisit classic films and ask you: does it still hold up? Last monthwe took on Stand By Me; this month's challenge is The Graduate, with movie critic Garen Daly leading the charge.
Written By Buck Henry and Calder Willingham, they delivered some of the most enduring movie quotes to date. But it was the young director Mike Nichols and the unknown actor Dustin Hoffman who were the movie's breakout successes. Simon and Garfunkle's soundtrack was also a standout character. In 2012 Mike Nichols described using that soundtrack to Time Out New York:
I’d been listening to their album every morning in the shower before I’d go to work, and then one morning it just hit me: ‘Schmuck! This is your soundtrack! It’s one of those miraculous moments you get when you’re making a movie, where everything somehow comes together. It’s better than sex. [Pause] Okay, maybe not better, but it’s indescribably fantastic.
When The Graduate was first released it was both a commercial and critical success. Here's how the New York Timessummed it up when it hit theaters:
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.
Though The Graduate is considered a classic, is the story of a lost, rich kid who is exempt from today's trillion dollar student loan debtstill relatable? For all the famous pop culture references it's given us, from "plastics" to the original cougar in Mrs. Robinson, does The Graduate have something to say to the college graduates of 2015? That's what we'll be asking you.
