Hoffman plays Benjamin Braddock, a 20-year-old who returns from college “out East” to his parents’ house in sun-drenched suburban California. By all accounts he had a stellar time on campus. He was the captain of the debating club and the cross-country team, and he was the editor of the student newspaper. Back at home, his situation looks even better. His parents buy him a red Alfa Romeo Spider, and their buddies keep giving him tips on how to have a high-flying career. (“Just one word: plastics.”) But Benjamin is deeply miserable. He is “just sort of disturbed about things,” he mumbles. He wants his life to be “different”.

His only distraction from this vague but paralysing malaise is an affair with his parents’ sophisticated friend Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft). But after a few weeks of hotel liaisons, Benjamin is forced to go on a date with Mrs Robinson’s daughter (Katharine Ross), and he inconveniently falls in love with her.

Scripted by Buck Henry and Calder Willingham, The Graduate is largely faithful to Charles Webb’s source novel, which was published in 1963, but Nichols makes a few inspired changes. The most obvious of these was casting Hoffman. Webb’s Benjamin is tall, blonde, athletic and handsome, much like the author himself; in Hoffman’s words, he is a “super-Wasp Boston Brahmin”. But Nichols had other ideas. Having met hundreds of potential Benjamins, he handed the part to an unknown actor who was short, dark-haired, and Jewish – an actor, that is, much like the director.

Odd man out

Hoffman, of course, is magnificent. He plays the role with such jittery panache that it’s now hard to imagine anyone else being Benjamin. But that counter-intuitive casting does have its disadvantages. As great as he is, Hoffman makes the film softer and less challenging than it might otherwise have been.

On the page, The Graduate is the story of someone who has a charmed life, but who finds that life less than charming. The questions it poses are: why? Why doesn’t Benjamin belong in his parents’ shinily affluent world? Why can’t he be happy with the conformist, consumerist future that they have mapped out for him? What is it about 1960s America that prompts a young, healthy, well-educated and prosperous baby boomer to be “sort of disturbed” rather than sort of delighted?