Here’s to YOU, Mrs Robinson...
Hoffman pawed his leading ladies. Doris Day rejected it as offensive. As The Graduate turns 50, BRIAN VINER reveals its very racy secrets
THERE are still many reasons to love classic movie The Graduate, which is half a century old this year, and just about to get a shiny new restoration for cinema release.
Who can forget the Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack; the way the film spoke for a generation disaffected with their parents’ way of doing things; the enigmatic but oddly satisfying ending; the humour; the sexiness; the romance; the one-liners?
it is a funny, brilliantly observed and rightly venerated film, which overnight turned the little-known Dustin Hoffman — who months earlier had been living on his uppers in New York — into a major star.
The Graduate tells the story of Benjamin Braddock (Hoffman) fresh from college, who comes from a monied California family and seems to have the world at his feet. At his homecoming party, in one of the film’s most famous lines, a family friend tells him to go into plastics. But Benjamin feels disillusioned and aimless.
Meanwhile, his mother is desperate for him to marry Elaine Robinson ( Katharine Ross), the beautiful daughter of close family friends. But by the time he gets round to doing his duty and asking her out, Benjamin is having a sordid affair with Elaine’s mother (Anne Bancroft), an alcoholic trapped in a sexless marriage.
He tries to make Elaine reject him, but falls for her and she for him . . . until she realises what has been happening behind her back. So Benjamin must woo her properly, but that’s not easy: she hates him.
Yet for all its brilliance and enduring appeal, The Graduate’s racy story and difficult characters meant it was never a sure-fire hit — and was nearly not made at all . . .
THE STRUGGLE TO FIND CASH BACKING
THE project began in 1963 when a movie producer called Lawrence Turman paid $1,000 for the screen rights to the book, by 24-year- old, first-time novelist Charles Webb. To direct, Turman wanted Mike Nichols, who was himself only 33. But he was a theatre director, with no cachet in Hollywood.
Major studios declined to finance the project, until Nichols made a movie based on his own Broadway production of Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. That 1966 film won five Academy Awards, and producer Joseph E. Levine’s Embassy Pictures duly agreed to back The Graduate.
WHY REDFORD WAS TOO SEXY
FOR the director the biggest challenge was finding someone to cast in the lead role, as the listless Benjamin. He considered an unknown Harrison Ford, Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen, Robert Duvall and even Britain’s Albert Finney. But it was Robert Redford who really wanted the part, and he and Nichols were friends.
Redford did a screen test, but Nichols quickly realised he was too dishy to play a cack-handed, impressionable virgin who had trouble unfastening a bra strap. The Graduate was a highly sexual film before the movies had really discovered sex, or certainly nudity, but it needed a clumsy seduction scene. Nichols let his pal down gently.
Had Redford ever had trouble picking up girls, he asked. ‘What do you mean?’ asked Redford.
Yes, said Nichols, that was precisely his point.
THE FUMBLE IN THE BEDROOM
AS FOR Benjamin’s screen seductress, Nichols endlessly discussed the casting with Turman, who drew up a shortlist of some of Hollywood’s biggest names, including Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, ingrid Bergman, Rita Hayworth, Deborah Kerr and sexy French actress Jeanne Moreau. The script was also sent to Doris Day, who found the story so offensive she refused even to consider the role. Nichols chose Bancroft to play Mrs Robinson and, once filming began, Hoffman radiated the neurotic perfectionism that later earned him a deserved reputation as ‘difficult’. He drove Nichols mad. But he had a talent for improvisation.
in a bedroom scene he suddenly, unbidden by either Bancroft or the script, placed his hand on her breast. Behind the camera, Nichols started to laugh. Hoffman realised he was about to crack up too, so he walked away and started banging his head against the wall. it would be one of the film’s most iconic moments.
OLDER WOMAN WHO WASN’T OLD AT ALL
THERE were other problems. Benjamin was meant to be an unworldly 21 and Hoffman was about to turn 30. indeed, the ages of the actors represent another quirk of The Graduate. Mrs Robinson is supposed to be a generation older than Ben. But Bancroft was only 35, not much older than Hoffman and just eight years older than Ross, her ‘daughter’.
DUSTIN’S BUTTOCK PINCHING ANTICS
WHEN Hoffman went to Hollywood to meet Nichols and Levine, the story goes that Levine mistook him for the office window-cleaner. Hoffman, ever the Method actor, took out his handkerchief and started wiping the windows.
it was a bad start and at the screen test things got worse.
Nichols had invited Katharine Ross along as well, having finally picked her from a list of possibles to play Elaine. it had included Jane Fonda, Goldie Hawn, Natalie Wood, Lee Remick and Hayley Mills. Unfortunately, Hoffman, already racked with nerves, was dazzled by the beauty of his potential co-star. To overcome his nerves and break the ice, he abruptly pinched her buttocks.
Ross was horrified and screamed at him never to do that again. Later, she said he seemed completely humourless, and looked ‘ about three feet tall’. The film, she thought, would be ‘a disaster’.
For Nichols, however, Hoffman had unwittingly shown just the kind of awkwardness that he wanted in the film. A few days later, he told him he had the part.
THE SONGS THAT CHANGED MOVIES
NOTHING is more iconic than the Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack. Nichols was half- way through filming before he asked the folk- rock duo ( below) for three new songs, with lyrics that would sum up Benjamin’s existential plight. it was a pioneering move; no traditional dramatic picture had been scored like this.
in the end, Nichols chose The Sound of Silence and Scarborough Fair, which had already been recorded, but he needed one more track. Garfunkel told him Simon was working on a song called Mrs Roosevelt, about former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Nichols begged him to change it to Mrs Robinson and the rest really is history. Those songs changed the way movies sounded.
OFF-SET RUMOURS OF ROMANCE
HOFFMAN was paid $ 17,000 ($132,000 in today’s money). Once he had paid tax and settled his debts, he had just $4,000.
He also had to settle his own bill at the hotel, where a fellow guest was Elizabeth Wilson, the actress playing his mother. They became friends and frequently had dinner together. Soon, rumours began to circulate that life was imitating art, and they were having an inappropriate affair just like Benjamin and Mrs Robinson.
THE 50th anniversary rerelease of The Graduate is in cinemas from June 23, and on DVD and Blu-ray on July 24.