Trivia

When famed film critic Roger Ebert saw The Graduate in 1967 he hailed it as "the funniest movie of the year" and gave it four stars. When he saw it thirty years later for the 30th anniversary re-release; which Siskel and Ebert covered in 1997, he dismissed it as "dated" and a "lesser movie": " It is a movie about a tiresome bore and his well-meaning parents. The only character in the movie who is alive--who can see through situations, understand motives, and dare to seek her own happiness--is Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft). Seen today, "The Graduate'' is a movie about a young man of limited interest, who gets a chance to sleep with the ranking babe in his neighborhood, and throws it away in order to marry her dorky daughter." Ebert goes on to say that the movie was "of it's time"; but it's time has passed. He asks" What murky generational politics were distorting my view the first time I saw this film?...'Is "The Graduate'' a bad movie? Not at all. It is a good topical movie whose time has passed, leaving it stranded in an earlier age. I give it three stars out of delight for the material it contains; to watch it today is like opening a time capsule. To know that the movie once spoke strongly to a generation is to understand how deep the generation gap ran during that extraordinary time in the late 1960s. There were true rebels in movies of the period (see "Easy Rider"), but Benjamin Braddock was not one of them. I wonder how long it took him to get into plastics.'" See more