The Graduate

Recently I watched The Graduate (Dustin Hofman, Anne Bancroft - music by Simon and Garfunkel) - made in 1967, the year of The Summer of Love.  The USofA and the world in general was in the throes of great social change.  The waves made during that summer spread through society - its morals, work, culture, and politics. The Graduate seemed to be meant to reflect the cultural clash between the generation that had survived World War Two, and their children.

At the time it was promoted as both a drama and a comedy - now, at times, in modern eyes, it seems quite creepy, and I struggled to find any humour in it at all.  Almost everyone in the movie is trying to impose their will on someone else.  Hofman's character seemed very wooden by any modern standard of acting - was that meant to depict some internal emotional turmoil, or perhaps an attempt to show a character we would now describe as "On the Spectrum"?

His treatment of the ultimate target of his affections - Elaine, the daughter of his lover - can only be described as stalking, and the denoument at the wedding looks more like an abduction than a mutual flight into a romantic future. Although Elaine finally reacts against the demands of her parents and older relatives by fleeing the church in which she was about to marry the man her parents had chosen for her, their reactions to each other as the bus takes them away from the church left this viewer wondering if she was already beginning to wonder which future was the frying pan and which the fire.

I was in High School when this movie was released, and not quite old enough to be allowed in to the cinema to watch it on my own.  If I had seen it then, I wonder what effect it might have had on my developing adolescent personality.  The music was great, but the plot and resolution of the movie were disturbing, to say the least, and must have seriously confused many an adolescent as they went through that difficult time of trying to establish an identity of their own.

How, I wonder, would I have reacted to that movie, as a teen?  Watching it for the first time in my sixties was to see it through the eyes of someone who has personally experienced, as well as observed in others, the complications, both joyous and tragic, that love and lust can bring to life.  I am sure the two viewpoints are vastly different - have you belatedly watched a movie that was part of the canon of your youthful times, and how did you find it, compared to the way it was received back then?