Original subtitles

# SIMON & GARFUNKEL: The Sound of Silence #

# Hello, darkness, my old friend

# I've come to talk with you again

# Because a vision softly creeping

# Left its seeds while I was sleeping...

The year is 1967,

the city is Los Angeles,

and floating on a sky-blue pool

is a young man named Benjamin Braddock.

He has returned home from college

with no idea what he wants from the future,

or indeed the present.

He is a lost soul, adrift on his parents' wealth,

and played by an oddly-built unknown

named Dustin Hoffman.

Mrs Robinson, you're trying to seduce me.

(GIGGLES)

Aren't you?

Well, no, I hadn't thought of it.

How would you say The Graduate defined an era?

It re-defined an era, really.

When you think of the youth films of the 1960s,

a young America thought it could do anything...

and snubs to the older generation.

And here comes a film which suggests the exact opposite.

Here's young Dustin Hoffman.

He's a college-educated middle-class lad

with everything in his favour.

He could get a good job just like that,

but he doesn't know what he wants.

He doesn't know anything about anything.

He's completely doubtful about his life,

compared to the hippies' 1960s, the earlier 1960s,

it's a completely different outlook.

(EXHALES)

(WATER SPLASHES)

The Graduate defined an era.

But more than that,

it turned a caustic eye on an increasingly divided America:

by wealth, by age, by sensibility.

With its shimmering melancholy and bittersweet humour,

it landed firmly into a generation

and reflected that generation.

(THE SOUND OF SILENCE CONTINUES)

# And the sign flashed out its warning

# In the words that it was forming

# And the sign said,

# "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls

# "And tenement halls

# "And whispered in the sounds...

# ..of silence. #

(SONG ENDS)

TV: "Recently, the March Of Time

"conducted an extensive survey of North Carolina's class of '49.

"They are men and women with a deeply felt appreciation

"of the blessings our society has afforded them.

"In our March Of Time Survey, they agree almost unanimously

"that they have attained the goal set for themselves in college.

"Only one graduate expressed dissatisfaction with life."

"The class of '49 has made its dream of material security come true.

"And this insular contentment, for better or worse,

"is finding its reflection in American society today."

Is anything wrong? No, no.

We're just on our way downstairs. The Carlsons are here.

They are? Well, come on.

They came all the way from Tarzana.

Come on, let's get cracking.

It's a wonderful thing to have so many devoted friends.

The astonishing script

was by comedian-turned-screenwriter Buck Henry,

who had unlocked the best seller on which it was based.

Behind the camera was comedian-turned-director

Mike Nichols,

making only his second film.

Together, actors, writer, and director

captured an elusive mood

like sunlight on a swimming pool.

At once very funny, even farcical,

but tinged in despair.

A symphony of embarrassments and heartbreak

that revolutionised Hollywood.

It was called The Graduate.

In 1963, Charles Webb wrote a book called The Graduate.

He'd been at an East Coast university

and at the age of 24,

he decided to put all of his experiences

in the Californian lifestyle.

He really really wanted to, sort of,

exorcise his feelings about his life.

Charles Webb's novel The Graduate was almost an autobiography.

He'd grown up on the West Coast. He'd been blonde, tall, sun-tanned.

His parents had a swimming pool

and when he moved east to university,

he very much rejected that lifestyle.

He found it repellent, and he wrote a book which really attacked

everything that he'd known growing up.

There was, he said, no Mrs Robinson,

that had been an invention of his.

His real problem was the conformity of the Californian existence.

This idea that everybody lived this very conformist,

very smartly dressed...

With cocktail parties where no one said anything of any meaning,

and everyone thought their kids ought to go into some kind of great future.

He was particularly appalled by his parents

and their friends' existence, which he saw as very zombie-like,

this endless round of socialising and work

that he really wanted no part of. He wanted to get off that carousel.

The journey to a phenomenon

begins with a young, untested producer named Lawrence Turman

who had read the novel and thought, "This is about me."

There are also two images that stuck in his mind:

a boy in a scuba suit

trapped at the bottom of a swimming pool,

and that same boy on a bus with a girl in a wedding dress.

Two images that will be seen in the final film.

He didn't have a lot of money to work with.

But with his shoestring budget,

he managed to option the rights to The Graduate

after reading a sort of mixed review of it in the New York Times.

But it captured his interest, he picked up the book

and he optioned it for only one thousand dollars

because no one else really wanted the book.

And so began the fairly long and arduous process

of getting The Graduate from a novel to the screen.

On a hunch,

he sought out the 33-year-old theatrical director Mike Nichols,

who was growing increasingly interested in the movies.

In Broadway circles,

Nichols was famed for sending up a particular brand of American anxiety.

On a hunch, Mike Nichols turned to Buck Henry,

co-creator of TV's Get Smart to write a screenplay.

He was concerned about getting a screenwriter

that could do the job on the script fairly quickly and easily.

He wasn't even thinking about actors yet,

but he needed to attach somebody appealing to this package.

Even with Mike Nichols on board,

a director who was so popular and fairly well-known in showbiz,

he just simply could not seem to sell it to a studio.

They almost all turned him down. They didn't find it funny.

Execs said they didn't understand what was comedic about the script,

I think probably because it was so deadpan.

It just failed to connect

to a often financially floundering movie business

that was in the market largely to make big comedies,

big musicals, big war films.

People just didn't seem to get it.

Why do you think Mike Nichols was the right man?

He'd come from Broadway, hadn't he?

Why do you think he was the perfect director?Well...

He turned out to be the perfect director,

but there was a great deal of doubt.

Some of them hated the book, of course.Yeah.

And they hated the piece of theatre,

so they wouldn't entertain the film at all.

And then they said, "Who is this Mike Nichols anyway?

"He's never done anything much, except in the theatre."

It's a great risk.

So it was a very difficult film to make.

MRS BRADDOCK: Here's Ben. Excuse me, just a minute.

Listen, everybody. I want you all to be quiet.

I've got Ben's college yearbook here

and I just want to read you some of the wonderful things about Ben.

Be quiet, please!

Captain of the cross-country team, head of the debating club,

associate editor of the college newspaper in his junior year

managing editor in his senior.

To me, The Graduate is a film about...

It's about the generation gap,

but it's really about someone who's just trying to find their own way

and they don't want to be pressurised

by the values of their parents almost.

But it's not a dropout movie.

It's not about someone who's going to go to Woodstock

and lead a totally alternative lifestyle.

It's about someone who's within the middle class, essentially.

You know, it's in Pasadena, in a suburb of Los Angeles.

He's just rootless and he is trying to find his way.

(FISH TANK BUBBLES)

Oh, I guess this isn't the bathroom, is it?

It's, uh, down the hall.

How are you, Benjamin? Fine, thank you, Mrs Robinson.

The, uh, bathroom's down at the end of the hall.

Such a pleasant room.

Eventually, the only producer he could get interested,

after two years of trying,

was a producer called Joseph E Levine

who was known as a schlock-meister,

by which they meant that he would buy European over-the-top films

like Hercules, he would put his own name over the top of it,

he would market the hell out of it, do an over-dubbed version

and make a lot of money out of a cheap purchase.

He was gradually, with his company Embassy Pictures,

trying to move into a more respectable...

actually making the films,

not just buying European celluloid and selling it on.

So he wanted to start investing,

and he knew that the director Mike Nichols had cache.

All three of them, producer, writer, and director,

thought of the material in the same way.

They all saw themselves as Benjamin Braddock.

That was the point that Hollywood missed.

In 1967,

this alienated graduate,

locked in his own head, spoke to a generation.

Will you come in, please?

What?

I'd like you to come in until I get the lights on.What for?

Because I don't feel safe till I get the lights on.

(PIANO MUSIC)

May I ask you a question?

What do you think of me?

What do you mean?

You've known me nearly all your life.

You must have formed some opinion of me.

Well, I always thought that you were a very nice person.

Did you know I was an alcoholic?

On the page, Benjamin was a golden boy Californian.

The writer, Charles Webb, was fair-haired and six-foot plus.

Everyone agreed, including Nichols,

that he had to be played by Robert Redford.

So a meeting was arranged,

and Nichols knew straight away that he wasn't right for the part.

He could never play a loser.

So the search began for the perfect loser.

Enter Dustin Hoffman,

10 years into a faltering New York stage career,

feeling certain the movies are not for him.

And then to cast...

Dustin Hoffman is... How absurd?

Dustin Hoffman was 30 at the time. Yes.

And it was odd casting because he's too old,

and she's too young really.

But Nichols saw something in the chemistry between them, didn't he?

He sensed the actors could achieve what he wanted from them.

Oh, yes, he did in the end.

I mean, it was astonishing.

Doris Day was asked to do it,

Jeanne Moreau was asked to do it,

Half of Hollywood was asked to do it.

(SOPHISTICATED ORCHESTRAL MUSIC)

TV: "In Acapulco,

"a lavish dinner party attracts a wide variety of celebrities,

"including Lynda Bird Johnson and her actor friend George Hamilton.

"Film star John Wayne enjoys the festivities,

"while Mexican movie actress Dolores del Rio and her husband

"are also among the famous guests.

"Lynda and George refuse to comment

"on speculation about a future wedding,

"while they spent the gay evening as almost constant dancing partners.

"A request to have the press barred from the party was refused."

Mike Nichols met Buck Henry at a party thrown by Jane Fonda.

This was a fascinating mix of people

because in one room there was older generation Hollywood royalty,

and the other half was the younger generation,

represented by Jane and her brother

and an all the people that they liked.

So it was a very, very interesting mix,

completely cross-generational.

Mike Nichols really enjoyed his improvisational style.

They riffed together at the party.

They really enjoyed each other's company, and he thought,

"This guy can deliver the character of Benjamin Braddock."

He could see in him

the same sense of being Benjamin Braddock

that Mike Nichols had first responded to in The Graduate.

Robert Redford was very keen to play the part of Benjamin Braddock

and he had negotiation talks with Mike Nichols.

Of course, they'd worked together on Barefoot in the Park,

which was Redford's first play,

so they knew each other.

It was quite clear to Nichols

that Redford was totally wrong for the part.

He asked him, "Have you ever had any trouble with women?"

And Robert Redford said, "What do you mean?"

And he said, "There we are. That's the answer.

"That's exactly what I mean."

He said, "You're not anxious.

"You don't have that sort of anxiety. You don't have it."

He said, "Well, I can act it."

But the fact is that what Nichols wanted,

and what he finally got,

was the actual visual representation

of the anxieties and the problems that Benjamin Braddock has.

So, Dustin was a jobbing stage actor in New York

and had been for almost a decade

by the time The Graduate and Hollywood really came calling.

He was 29 when he starred in The Graduate.

He had worked up some steam in a few plays that got decent write-ups.

He had recently had something

which got on the cover of the New York Times Magazine.

But generally speaking, it was a bit of a long haul for him.

He was friends with many of the great luminaries

that would turn out to also be very successful.

He shared a flat with Gene Hackman at a certain point,

but he often struggled to get gigs.

He looked very Jewish and that could be a real handicap at the time.

He said he was always, sort of, cast in particular types of roles,

sort of typecast often.

And he did a lot of other jobs at the same time.

He worked in Macy's in the toy department.

He worked as an attendant in a psych ward.

He really knew what it was to struggle to make ends meet.

There were times where he had considered giving up

and maybe going into directing or doing something else,

so it was remarkable that he had maintained the grit at that point

to even be still in the running for a film like The Graduate.

The screen test couldn't have gone any worse.

Nichols arranged for Hoffman to come to Los Angeles,

and he arrived crippled with nerves,

sleepless, pale as of bedsheet,

intimidated by all of the tanned Californian crew,

in awe of Katharine Ross,

who'd been lined up to play Elaine Robinson.

He stuttered his lines.

He failed to heed what Nichols wanted from him.

It went on for 12 hours.

But on screen, it worked.

All that agitation, all that lost boy stammer

added up to Benjamin Braddock.

Hoffman brings magnificent self-consciousness to the role,

an itch beneath the skin

that amplified the alienation of the character.

Well, no, I hadn't thought of it. I feel very flattered.

Mrs Robinson, will you forgive me for what I just said?

It's alright. It's not alright.

It's the worst thing I ever said to anyone.Sit down.

Please forgive me because I like you.

I don't think of you that way, but I'm mixed up.

It's alright. Finish your drink.

Mrs Robinson, it makes me sick that I said that to you.

Well, forget it right now. Finish your drink.

Mike Nichols' next step was to find Mrs Robinson.

This was...

an equally difficult task.

He chose Anne Bancroft because

they wanted an American actress who had a European quality,

someone who could seem a little bit out of place

but was very much of the place.

He could see the frustration that Anne Bancroft herself had.

She had originally been a successful young starlet

who played glamorous roles

and then Hollywood had sort of given up on her

and stopped allowing her to develop her career.

So she'd gone into theatre and still slightly resented Hollywood

for the way it had cast her off.

And she just fit the role perfectly.

She looked and talked the role.

She was too young. She was 35 and Mrs Robinson is 45.

In fact, she was quite close to Dustin Hoffman in age,

but he felt that she had the talent to bring it up in age terms,

and she does have this very convincing weariness about her.

It just worked so well.

The other thing I really feel about all of this is that

it's speaking to people who are within the mainstream,

within the middle classes, broadly speaking,

but facing some kind of dissatisfaction.

I felt that dissatisfaction is really what The Graduate's about.

Mrs Robinson is dissatisfied. She's in a loveless marriage.

Benjamin is dissatisfied

with the fact that his parents want him to go work in plastics.

You know, everyone's dissatisfied.

Even the parents, you feel like they're living the American dream

without any real, deeper thought behind it.

So I think it's a film about dissatisfaction.

If Hoffman was the star,

the dark heart of The Graduate is Anne Bancroft's Mrs Robinson.

There had been plans to cast Hollywood greats

like Deborah Kerr, Rita Hayworth, or even Doris Day.

Nichols had met with Ava Gardner and been dazzled,

but knew she was wrong.

In truth, he was set on Bancroft.

There was something brittle and beautiful about her.

She'd been cast aside by Hollywood.

She was also an ex,

and he remembered the cynicism,

always one quip ahead of you.

And she brings to the role a superb performance,

broken-hearted, wounded, insolent, and world-weary,

and always we get that sense of bitterness.

If you look back on it now,

why do you think Dustin Hoffman somehow embodies Benjamin

and Anne Bancroft fulfils what we need in Mrs Robinson?

Anne Bancroft was a great actress.

No doubt about that at all.

She really holds the screen tightly throughout,

and you believe in her, even though she does seem a bit young.

Dustin Hoffman...

the very doubtfulness of his acting is a help.

He's not a confident actor at that stage in his career

but it works because he's not very confident.

That's the whole point about him.

So...

The two work wonderfully together.

And when... in the latter half of the film,

Mrs Robinson fades out...

..so does the film in a way.

Yeah. You miss her presence. You really miss her.

Katharine Ross is very good

as the girl Dustin Hoffman eventually falls for.

But those two as a pair are not as interesting as this older woman.

I mean, the thought of an older woman with a young man

is still shocking today.

People say, "Ooooh!"

They don't mind the other way around,

but the older woman with the young man somehow...

Uh...

(CHUCKLES NERVOUSLY) I don't quite know how to put this.

"Benjamin."

Look, I was thinking about that time after the party.

"Where are you?"

And I was wondering if I could buy you a drink or something.

"Where are you?" Uh, the Taft Hotel.

"Did you get a room?"

No.

Now I know it's pretty late and if you'd rather-

"Give me an hour." What?

"I'll be there in an hour." (CALL DISCONNECTS)

(BREATHES NERVOUSLY)

(WHIMPERS)

# SIMON & GARFUNKEL: Scarborough Fair/Canticle #

# Are you going to Scarborough Fair?

# Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme

# Remember me to one who lives there

# She once was a true love of mine. #

Halfway through production,

Nichols's brother sent him a copy of Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme,

the new album by Folk troubadours Simon and Garfunkel.

He would listen to it incessantly for a month,

and he realised this was the sound of The Graduate.

Poetic, wry, haunting, and heartbreaking.

Simon and Garfunkel were really the perfect artists for The Graduate

because they had this sound which was part of the 1960s counterculture

but it was gentle.

It fitted into the mainstream very much.

A lot of that was down to

Paul Simon's discovery of English folk music.

He came to England in the mid-1960s,

and he was hanging out with people like Martin McCarthy

who was a big English folk singer,

and he was learning how to fingerpick

and do this rather intricate

but very melodic style of guitar playing.

And that has a kind of winsome quality.

It's got a questing quality,

that English folk style,

which he then took and applied a kind of American sensibility to it.

So that's when you end up with songs like The Sound of Silence

and April She Will Come. Songs like that.

The music was essential.

Simon & Garfunkel, who were the folk singers,

part of the era's music of protest, was the soundtrack.

That gave the film a very 1960s feel.

So when you're hearing songs like Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme,

or when you were hearing The Sound of Silence,

these were the soundtrack to a lot of the youth movement protests.

So, it really focused it on the teenagers

and the young people of the day.

Famously, Simon & Garfunkel's album had been given to Mike Nichols

halfway through filming.

He was listening to it in the shower quite a lot

and decided to try The Sound of Silence

over the montage of Dustin Hoffman

post his initial encounter with Mrs Robinson,

and he realised it was right.

# SIMON & GARFUNKEL: The Sound of Silence # And the people bowed and prayed

# To the neon god they made

# And the sign flashed out its warning

# In the words that it was forming

# And the sign said,

# "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls

# "And tenement halls

# And whispered in the sounds...

# ..of silence. #

The lyricism and the melancholy of Simon and Garfunkel's music

lended itself really well to Benjamin's loneliness.

In the film you kind of see it as his internal monologue in some way.

It really kind of gives something to the film.

At this point, poised on the cusp of

the whole New Hollywood movement of the 1970s,

you see that pop and rock soundtracks

were consistently used more and more on films made by younger filmmakers.

And this is one of the first, along with a film like Easy Rider,

to include a modern soundtrack.

It lends some zip and some urgency, I think,

to the overall feeling of the film.

And of course, in 1968,

Mrs Robinson became number one on the charts as well.

It is interesting how Mike Nichols used Simon Garfunkel.

Initially, it was going to be orchestra, the usual approach.

He contacted Paul Simon, and he brought Paul Simon in

and, I think, Art Garfunkel too.

Initially, it was using Scarborough Fair as guide music.

It wasn't er...

It was just putting it together against the visuals

and showing an idea of how it might come across.

Paul Simon was watching, and he was...

He started coming up with this little riff,

it's quite a famous riff now, the riff on Mrs Robinson.

Humming along, initially, it was a kind of free association of words.

"God bless you, Mrs Roosevelt"

which would've been an entirely different film if that'd stayed in,

You know, Joe DiMaggio, these people from the past.

It's almost like he was kind of riffing on America's past,

America's 20th-century past.

Writing this song which didn't have any clear meaning,

but it's almost like the meaning made itself clear after the event.

God bless you, please, Mrs Robinson.

None of it was formed.

It wasn't that he...

he didn't sit down there and write the lyrics.

He was watching the film, had his guitar, riffing about,

and then half of it, of course, has no words whatsoever.

It's just those wordless vocals

because he was just doing it as he went along.

From that came one of the most famous songs of the 20th century.

# SIMON & GARFUNKEL: Mrs Robinson #

# And here's to you, Mrs Robinson

# Jesus loves you more than you will know

# Woah, woah, woah. #

That song on its own,

more or less, sold the movie.

It put it in a completely different league.

It became its own sort of phenomenon.

It made Simon and Garfunkel.

Although they were rising stars,

Mrs Robinson was the song that put them right up there.

I mean, they were American number one for weeks and weeks and weeks.

And at the same time, it sort of fed back into the success of the film

because Mrs Robinson was the iconic character of the movie.

Absolutely perfect.

An artist adrift in a world of plastic conformity,

seeking an identity,

The Graduate is as much the story of Mike Nichols

as it is Benjamin Braddock.

He will be introducing a new emotional language

to American film.

It's a huge influence on the likes of Steven Soderberg, David Lynch,

The Coen Brothers,

Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino,

who all took from it that natural irony that it had,

that skewed view of Los Angeles that it showed.

"Dear Benjamin, Please forgive me

"because I know what I'm doing is the best thing for you.

"My father is so upset. You've got to understand.

"I love you, but it would never work out."

# SIMON & GARFUNKEL: Mrs Robinson #

(ENGINE ROARS)

The extraordinary thing about The Graduate is that...

In 1967, the studio system was wobbly,

it was starting to sort of unravel itself,

it was outdated, outmoded.

They were still making movies

and they were still making some great movies,

but there was a new generation waiting in the wings

to actually break down the doors of Old Hollywood

and make new kinds of movies, make a different kind of movie

for a different kind of generation.

There was a generation of kids out there

who did not want to see the old Hollywood stars,

magnificent as they were,

they wanted their own stars,

they wanted their own people. And they didn't want...

people who they looked up to,

they wanted people who they could identify with.

Someone slightly geeky,

someone who wanted to be cool but wasn't,

someone who was anxious about his life,

as they all were at that stage.

The Graduate was a huge hit in its year of release

but that was not what everybody expected in Hollywood.

When Joseph E Levine took it around the other studio heads,

they said, "This is a terrible film."

When it was tested in front of professionals, they all said,

"Oh, this is not gonna work. It's an OK film, but it's terribly cast."

So there was this feeling of bleak despair.

At one point, Levine was going to downgrade the film

to a very limited release.

But then he decided to try showing it in college campuses.

Now, what's interesting here is that

we think of this film as being a very radical film

about youthful rebellion.

And it is in a way,

but it's also a very conservative film.

Because the college campuses they took this film to...

This was 1968 when the film was released,

The Gulf of Tonkin in the Vietnam War had been 1964.

These were campuses where there were student occupations,

where people wanted to talk about the Vietnam War,

about conscription, about protest.

And actually, Benjamin is an incredibly square guy.

He's always wearing a shirt and tie.

He's always shaving. There's no political opinions.

So initially the students' response was,

"Where's the Vietnam War in this film?"

And that seemed to be a big problem.

"OK, so the studio doesn't like it.

"The college kids don't like it. Where is it gonna play?"

They started it in a few cinemas

and the audiences went crazy for it.

Maybe the producers and studio executives

saw themselves in the older Robinsons and Braddocks,

but that film caught fire.

Dustin Hoffman recalled attending a preview in New York

and watching the film gather momentum like a runaway train.

By the time his character is rushing to the church,

the room was screaming.

He held back in the cinema,

terrified that he'd be recognised as Benjamin.

One old lady did.

She turned out to be Radie Harris, a gossip columnist,

and she pointed her cane at him

like one of Macbeth's witches to prophesy

"Are you Dustin Hoffman?

"Are you The Graduate?

"Your life is never gonna be the same again."

She was right.

We can say that it really was probably

the first film to herald what we call New Hollywood,

that new wave of filmmaking that came in the late 1960s and 1970s.Yeah.

They probably wouldn't have come in at all,

but for The Graduate,

because it was a success.

I mean, it changed Hollywood's attitude completely.

They wondered, you know, "What?"

"Who is this young man, whom we don't know,

"making a film with this young boy who we don't know either?

There's a wonderful story about Dustin Hoffman being in New York

after the film had come out

and peering out a window and seeing these queues break the block.

Yes.

This great success, everything he could have wanted,

and being even more worried now

that he was going to be noticed everywhere.

Which is exactly how Benjamin would've reacted to it.Yes.

Word got out.

The queues stretched from block to block.

A young audience went back again and again.

The film that had been rejected by every studio in Hollywood

became the biggest hit of the year.

It has gone on to become one of the most profitable films of all time.

# SIMON & GARFUNKEL: Mrs Robinson #

(DOG BARKS)

# SIMON & GARFUNKEL: Mrs Robinson # # Stand up tall, Mrs Robinson

# God in Heaven smiles on those who pray

# Hey, hey, hey #

(BRASS FANFARE PLAYS)

TV: "Mrs Lyndon B Johnson comes to Williams College

"for an honorary degree.

"President John Sawyer escorts the First Lady

to the ceremony at Chapin Hall.

"She took no formal notice of a group of anti-war picketers

"who staged a silent vigil protesting the Vietnam War.

"Some 75 student demonstrators walked out of the auditorium where

"Mrs Johnson was given an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree

"for her national beautification program.

"Despite the demonstration, the first lady is warmly applauded."

(APPLAUSE)

Do you think that Nichols was attuned to America at that time?

I mean, he always claimed it's not a Vietnam film

but there's a sense of something terrible going on in the background,

such doom almost. Yes.

Oh, he was definitely a Liberal Democrat in other words.

He was someone who felt that America had gone badly wrong somehow

and that the young people's hopefulness had been betrayed.

This is really about that betrayal,

even though it comes out OK in the end for Hoffman,

I think, doesn't it? (!)

Well, it's a fabulous last shot on the bus, isn't it?

It's almost like a beat too long

and suddenly they're looking in different directions,

and you think, "Will they stay together?"

"Will this work out?" You're left questioning at the end.

Yes. I suppose you are.

In Hoffman's star turn,

a new breed of leading man was introduced to the world.

They no longer needed to resemble Robert Redford or Paul Newman,

the Old Hollywood ideal of the American Prince.

Now, they could look like Hoffman

or Gene Hackman or Robert Duvall or Al Pacino.

This wasn't the Hollywood Dream.

This was American reality.

The film accelerated and accelerated and accelerated,

and it became the box office smash of that year.

At one point, the New Yorker devoted 26 pages of analysis to the film,

trying to understand what its enormous appeal was.

It also changed the way Hollywood thought about its audience.

They'd previously not really understood

how to segment audiences in quite the right way.

They'd played about with this a bit in the 1950s with James Dean,

but they'd really tried to move back into these musicals

and these big-budget action pictures which were for everyone.

This was very much appealing to a particular demographic;

these were kids who came and saw it again and again and again.

There's this absolutely fanatical devotion.

I mean, at one point in Columbia college's occupation,

when the students were occupying the buildings there,

every now and then they would sneak out

so they could see The Graduate at the local cinema,

and then come back in to carry on with their political protests.

So it became the lifeblood of the youth of the time,

even though in a strange way, it's a 1950s movie.

Elaine!

Elaine! Who is that guy? What's he doing?

Take care of him. He's too late.

Elaine!

Elaine! Elaine!

Elaine! (CROWD MUTTERS)

Elaine! Make him stop.

Elaine!

Elaine! Elaine! Elaine!

Elaine!

Elaine! Elaine! Elaine! (SHOUTING DROWNS OUT SPEECH)

Elaine!

Ben!!

The latter part of the film is very, very condensed.

Suddenly you find that Mrs Robinson

has engineered for her daughter, Elaine,

to marry this jock from college called Carl.

They're in a very modern church with a lot of glass,

of course, because there's glass right all the way through this film.

Benjamin is racing to try and stop the marriage,

and to declare his love, and to rescue the damsel...

realising that he could actually be too late.

And so... at that point,

Elaine looks around and...

there's this sort of momentary indecision.

You think, "Oh, my God, he's come for her."

And they basically run off together,

they jump on a bus and go to the back of the bus.

It's a most spontaneous sort of... reaction,

very highly improbable I have to say,

but what's really incredible about this is that...

if it had been a slightly more conventional Hollywood movie...

..Benjamin would've rescued her before she'd taken her vows.

In other words, she would've hesitated before saying "I do."

Then the moment he would've got her, they would've run off.

That's not the case.

Buck Henry had actually extended Charles Webb's ending

so that the couple had taken their vows,

and then he thought better of it and retracted it.

But Mike Nichols said, "No, no, we'll keep that."

I think that gives it even more serious import,

which is what he wanted.

This is a Mike Nichols film,

and Mike Nichols is saying

this future for them is desperately uncertain.

Mike Nichols always resisted the idea

that the film was explicitly political,

or that it was about the generation gap,

which a lot of people said when it came out.

He didn't love that either.

I mean, it's hard to say it's not about some kind of generation gap

but I also don't know if I think it's political

so much as social or spiritual in a way.

But it is also about class,

and it is also about the entitlement and arrogance

of the WASP upper middle class,

the expectation that the American dream was theirs to grab.

It's about kicking back against something,

even if it's not full of the affectations of lifestyle,

like long hair or drugs or overt anti-war sentiment.

Some people actually criticised it for that at the time and said,

"If there was gonna be a film about youth culture, then it should be more explicit in what it's saying."

I don't think it needed to ever be that.

I think what it does is perfectly good on its own.

I think is something that... For example,

there would be no Don Draper, there would be no Mad Men

without a film like The Graduate and what it touches upon.

He's being forced to take up a life that isn't his from day one.

The whole thing about going into plastics and all that.

And, you know...

Then he's floating in the pool, drifting,

and you know that he's not going to live that life.

And the music is the soundtrack to that feeling, as much as anything.

That's why the soundtrack is so clever

because it's more than just a nice tune

to go along with it or to pace it, you know? It's more than that.

It's actually capturing the underlying thought really.

More than the tension, it's like the underlying thought that he's having.

I think it captures the film so perfectly,

but also it captured Simon and Garfunkel at their absolute best.

Simon and Garfunkel only had a short golden age.

It wasn't long before they stopped getting on so well, let's say.

For that period when you've got Art Garfunkel's pure voice,

which has got a playfulness to it,

and Paul Simon's incredible writing skills

where he can just take a simple riff on a guitar or a simple piano line

and build this really universal song with a universal quality to it.

It only lasted for a couple of years.

And I think The Graduate was the...

It was almost the perfect film,

and they were the perfect band for it.

(SMOOTH PIANO MUSIC)

Hello, Benjamin. Oh, hello.

Bancroft, I think became well-known in Hollywood,

quite justly, for that performance

because it was funny,

it was moving,

and it was absolutely right for the part I think.

And there's a wonderful story also that she was told by everybody,

her agent, all the people around her,

"Don't take this. You're playing an older woman.

"This is the worst thing you could possibly do.

The one person who said, "This is a great script"

was her husband, Mel Brooks. Was it? I didn't know that.

He went "This was a good script.

"This is very funny. You should do this."

It's very amazing because Buck Henry hadn't done much before.No.

He wasn't really a scriptwriter.

I think it's Nichol's almost improvisational instinct, isn't it?

That he just had the right idea

and between them, they could play off each other as writer and director.

Yes, it's true.

The Graduate would be nominated for seven Oscars,

with Mike Nichols the only winner on the night.

But alongside fellow nominee Bonnie and Clyde,

it'll be at the vanguard of New Hollywood,

vivid and vibrant new directors with radical material.

Film had something to say.

In June 1968,

with Simon and Garfunkel at number one with Mrs Robinson,

Robert Kennedy was assassinated in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel,

where they had filmed scenes of Benjamin and Mrs Robinson

meeting for their affair.

Vietnam had begun.

And in that famous last shot of the film...

where Benjamin and Elaine are on the back of the bus...

there is just a hint of something else going on.

We are left to wonder, "Is this a happy ending?"

They are gazing in different directions.

What will become of them?

# And the vision that was planted in my brain

# still remains

# within the sound of silence.

# In restless dreams, I walked alone...

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