Throwing a Poolside Cocktail Party for ‘The Graduate’
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Version 0 of 1. SEDUCED BY MRS. ROBINSON How ‘The Graduate’ Became the Touchstone of a Generation By Beverly Gray Illustrated. 282 pp. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. $24.95. Aside from the joyfully cocky title of a classic 1965 song by the Who, the phrase “my generation” is not generally used by anyone of my generation — or anyone else either. While those living it make their own discoveries, mistakes and art, generational descriptions are almost always the work of elders (“the younger generation”), youngers (“our parents’ generation”) or marketers (Silent, Greatest, Boomer, Pepsi) attempting to commodify the unstoppable cultural changes that accompany the forward movement of time. But here comes “Seduced by Mrs. Robinson: How ‘The Graduate’ Became the Touchstone of a Generation,” in which the Santa Monica-based entertainment writer Beverly Gray doubles down on the declaration embedded in her book’s subtitle by inserting herself throughout the pages as a leading touchstone toucher: By “a generation,” she really means “my generation.” And to prove it, the author, who has previously published books about the filmmakers Roger Corman and Ron Howard, pops up in first person throughout an otherwise average recounting of the making of “The Graduate” and its reception to say, “I was there.” At first, I couldn’t figure out why Gray kept chiming in. (“How well I remember!” she volunteers, describing thoroughly well-documented changes in the 1960s California educational system.) After all, last month marked the 50th anniversary of the movie’s release, and that is reason enough to throw “The Graduate” a poolside cocktail party on its own merits. Why strain so hard to lay a personal generational narrative on a Hollywood history far more interesting than Gray or me or you or most any individual reader who was or wasn’t around in 1967 to help make the movie the surprise hit it was? (Why, too, does the author devote the whole middle section of her book to what is essentially a scene-by-scene recap, from opening logo to closing moments? Those who are interested in “Seduced by Mrs. Robinson” have presumably seen the movie, and those who have not seen the movie will not be enlightened by Gray’s chatty narration for the visually impaired.) A half-century has passed since the bewildered college graduate Benjamin Braddock, played with star-making originality by a then largely unknown Dustin Hoffman, floated, directionless, in his parents’ glassy Beverly Hills pool, and was told (by someone of his Parents’ Generation) that the future lay in “plastics.” It has been a half-century since Anne Bancroft smoldered as the seductive Mrs. Robinson, an unhappy woman who was the opposite of bewildered — an adult mature enough to know she was trapped in the hell of plastic marital conventions. It has been 50 years since Hoffman, Bancroft and the incandescently creative team of the director Mike Nichols and the screenwriter Buck Henry took Charles Webb’s small 1963 novel of domestic discontents and turned it into a movie that epitomized huge shifts in both popular culture and Hollywood commerce. Then again, all this has been recounted before, with nuanced and perceptive synthesis, by Mark Harris in his popular 2008 history, “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood,” now a classic of cultural reporting and analysis. (Gray refers to Harris, a friend of mine, more than once.) And, for a fine magazine-length version, a reader can call up Sam Kashner’s 2008 Vanity Fair piece “Here’s to You, Mr. Nichols: The Making of ‘The Graduate.’” “Seduced by Mrs. Robinson” is a puzzling project. It is also a compilation of an awful lot of distracting clichés. The famous camera shot of Hoffman framed by the crook of Bancroft’s stockinged leg is a moment “that lives on in film history.” The voices of the movie’s fans “still echo through the years.” Gray cites notebook entries the producer Lawrence Turman made “when the project was merely a gleam in his eye.” She explains that “The Graduate” appealed to “high-spirited young rebels who delighted in thumbing their noses at the status quo.” She interviews Hoffman “at a film industry gathering, held at an upscale Beverly Hills Mexican eatery,” where “he proved surprisingly approachable, despite the throngs of fans waiting their chance to schmooze with the star.” Recent allegations of sexual harassment by Hoffman may dim a reader’s envy at the opportunity for schmoozing. Do not take this as a nose-thumb so much as a brow-furrow. The author’s interview with Hoffman took place in 2008 — and here we come to a clue to understanding the book’s tortured structure, its pained search for an angle: Most of the research seems to have taken place a decade ago. The majority of Gray’s direct reporting comes from two long interviews with Turman, now 91, who, as a Hollywood novice, was canny enough to obtain the rights to Webb’s novel. The first of those interviews took place in 2007. Turman published his own book, “So You Want to Be a Producer,” in 2005. (The second Turman interview took place in 2015.) Gray says in her acknowledgments that her book “rose like a phoenix from the ashes of a previous project.” Was it shelved after “Pictures at a Revolution” and the Vanity Fair history of “The Graduate” came out in 2008, making her version a making-of too many? Is it out now by the luck of a marketed golden anniversary? This formerly youthful moviegoer would like to know. In the meantime, she recommends looking up the provocative re-review written by Roger Ebert in 1997 to mark the movie’s 30th anniversary. The movie critic, who died in 2013, was in his youthful-enough 20s in 1967 when he declared “The Graduate” “the funniest American comedy of the year.” Three decades later, he saw that Hoffman’s Benjamin was an “insufferable creep,” and that Bancroft’s Mrs. Robinson — “sardonic, satirical and articulate” — was “the only person in the movie you would want to have a conversation with.” Ebert was talkin’ ’bout my generation. |