The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson
Ayoung man comes home to Beverly Hills for the summer after his graduation, is seduced by one of his parents’ married friends, then falls in love with her daughter. This was the précis for a comedydrama that every Hollywood studio rejected in the mid-Sixties.
It was based on a 1963 novella called The Graduate, written by 22 year-old Charles Webb, which had received some minor critical acclaim without ever being mistaken for the next Catcher in the Rye. Budding producer Larry Turman snapped up the film rights for $1,000 (£785), then spent several years trying and failing to piece the project together – even after he’d found a director, Mike Nichols, fresh from a Broadway triumph (with Robert Redford in Barefoot in the Park) and looking to make his mark in film. For a while, it was touch and go whether The Graduate, now celebrating its half-century, would even get made. Certainly no one had an inkling as to the popular landmark it would become.
In order to raise the budget (an estimated $3 million), Turman brought in Joseph E. Levine, an impresario who had made his name importing bizarre foreign B-movies. “He was a schlockmeister, the opposite of the word ‘classy’,” says Turman, now 90, down the line from Los Angeles. “Mike Nichols was born with an intelligent, sensitive quality and Levine probably liked the idea of being in business with someone like him. It helped elevate his overall stature. As financier, he had nothing to do with the casting or script. Nichols and I shared total creative control.”
Though The Graduate was supposed to be Nichols’s first feature, the long uncertainties in pre-production meant that it wound up being his second, after he took on the film of Edward Albee’s Broadway smash Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. While Nichols dealt with the demanding job of babysitting the world’s most famous couple in brutal histrionics, both on-set and off, Nichols’s actor friend Buck Henry finally nailed the script for The Graduate after three other screenwriters had tried and failed. His version underlined the comedy of the set-up: the bored, predatory older woman, Mrs Robinson, and the virginal, uneasy hero, Benjamin Braddock, terrified by her advances. Dustin Hoffman, famously, was the last person that anyone expected to get the Braddock part. In Webb’s book, Benjamin is a 6 ft, blondhaired, blue-eyed sports hero – an archetypal WASP with the least neurotic exterior you could imagine. “I was ‘ the Jewish kid’, and this was not a Jewish part,” the 5 ft 6 in, brown-haired, brown-eyed Hoffman recollects. “Well, maybe he’s Jewish on the inside,” was Nichols’s rationale. A far more obvious lead actor might have been Robert Redford. A close friend of the director, he got as far as reading for the part opposite Candice Bergen. “I love Bob,” Turman said to Nichols, “but who’s going to believe he’s insecure around a female?” Nichols, coming around to this point of view, broke the news to Redford. “How many times have you struck out with a girl,” he asked. “I rest my case.” Hoffman, who had impressed both Nichols and Henry in a recent stage role as a transvestite Russian fishwife, was one of four other actors tested – including Charles Grodin, who got close. “There was no ‘Eureka!’ moment,” Turman recalls. After screening the audition tapes for the roles of both Braddock and Mrs Robinson’s daughter, Elaine, he says he and Turman “sat quietly, and I said, ‘ You know, I think I would be OK with Dustin and Katharine Ross.’ We walked back to Mike’s office, and he said, ‘ Yes, let’s use them.’ It was that casual. Luckily, they both turned out to be excellent.”
It’s one of the great flukes of casting that Hoffman, then aged 29, wound up starring opposite Anne Bancroft, who was only six years his senior, and yet not for one second do you fail to believe they’re a generation apart. “She ended up being our first choice,” says Turman, though Doris Day, who wasn’t interested, and Patricia Neal, who was too unwell, were also on his wish list.
Hair and costume departments – and cinematographer Robert Surtees, ageing her up through “unkind” lighting – helped transform Bancroft into a weary sophisticate, collaborating on an overall look that Nichols liked to call “the beast in the jungle”. With her silver streaks, visible bikini marks and wildcat print dresses, she became the perfect embodiment of Nichols’s vision.
Not everything went so smoothly. Gene Hackman was cast in the role of Mr Robinson, but Nichols fired him after three weeks’ rehearsal in favour of Murray Hamilton. “I was nonplussed, and had no idea why at the time,” says Turman. “Years later, I realised that Hackman has an aura of strength, whereas Mr Robinson is a weak person, in contrast to his very strong wife.”
Hoffman, for his part, was paralysed by anxiety – “violently nervous”, in his own words. “I could feel the sweat building.” Still, feeding off this terror, and gaining the confidence to improvise within it, is exactly what cut him out, in this star-making role, to be the Benjamin that Nichols had in mind: a stricken prisoner of his own
Released 50 years ago, The Graduate is one of film’s all-time greats. But, says Tim Robey, it almost didn’t reach the screen