The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Mike Nichols · a film · 1967 · about 106 minutes · screenplay by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry, from the novel by Charles Webb
Mode
Satirical comedy turned toward desolation and then toward romance and chase; the coming-of-age film made with the instruments of the European new cinema
Mythos
The young man who must pass through the mother to reach the bride, and is cursed for it; the bride stolen from the altar; the drowned son, baptism refused
Phase
One summer and autumn after a graduation, in four movements: the homecoming and the hotel, the affair and the drift, Elaine and Berkeley, the drive south and the church; closed by a bus
Presentation
Feature film in colour and widescreen, released by Embassy Pictures in December 1967, about 106 minutes, in one version; songs by Paul Simon sung by Simon and Garfunkel, with score by Dave Grusin
Register
Deadpan comedy held in long, still frames, montage carried by song, a romance played straight, and a climax half exhilaration and half horror
Scale
One young man, two households, two marriages, a daughter, and the affluence of a postwar suburb
Governing Proposition
A young man comes home from college to his parents’ house in suburban California, lets himself be taken into an affair with the wife of a friend of his parents, and then falls in love with her daughter. The wager of the film is that the prosperity laid out for him is a slow drowning, that the one adult who knows it is the woman who has drowned in it, and that escaping the parents’ world is not yet knowing what one wants: the rebellion is real and empty at once.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a young man standing still while something else moves him. Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, rides a moving walkway through an airport, motionless against a white wall, as Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” begins. He has finished college and come home to Los Angeles. He has done everything he was asked to do, and the first image shows what that has made of him: a figure carried along a track he did not lay, with nothing to do but stand on it.
At home his parents, played by William Daniels and Elizabeth Wilson, give a party in his honour, and he hides from it in his room, behind the glass of an aquarium. A friend of the family takes him aside to offer the future in one word, “Plastics”, and the word is the whole of the advice. The house is full of glass and white walls, and Robert Surtees’s widescreen frames set Benjamin in it as a small figure in a large clean space, watched from every side.
For his birthday he is put into a diving suit, and the family and their friends gather at the pool to see him in it. The camera goes inside the mask. There is only his breathing on the soundtrack and, through the glass, the adults waving him back under. He stands on the bottom of his parents’ pool. The film has made its image of him in its first minutes, under glass and under water, and everything that follows is an attempt, timid and then wild, to get out.
Movement II
Mrs. Robinson, played by Anne Bancroft, is the wife of a friend of his parents. She makes her approaches, and he is framed against her bent leg. The affair begins in farce: the Taft Hotel, a room key fumbled, a clerk’s question, a toothbrush, a boy who cannot manage the arrangements of the sin he has agreed to commit.
The farce is required. The affair must begin as comedy for its deadness to register when it settles. What follows is the summer, carried by montage and song. Benjamin drifts on a raft in the pool, and as he hauls himself up onto it the cut lands him on Mrs. Robinson in the hotel bed, a single movement across two places. Sam O’Steen’s cutting carries him back and forth between the pool and the hotel room with no change in his face. The affair and the idleness are one state, and the film makes them one surface.
Once, in the dark of the hotel room, she speaks of having studied art. It is the only moment in which the film lets her be seen from inside, and it is enough: the woman who has taken the boy into her despair is the one adult in the film who knows what the life laid out for him costs, because she has paid it. Bancroft plays her weary, contemptuous and wounded in one register, and the film never takes back what this scene gives her.
Movement III
Mrs. Robinson forbids him her daughter, Elaine, played by Katharine Ross. He takes Elaine out, and the film turns from satire to romance. He confesses the affair, Elaine goes back to Berkeley, and Mrs. Robinson tells her daughter a lie of rape to keep him from her.
Benjamin follows Elaine north. He takes a room in a boarding house, watches her on the campus, is questioned by his landlord, and is confronted by Mr. Robinson, played by Murray Hamilton, in a rage that belongs to melodrama. Elaine comes to his room and goes away again. The section circles: several of its scenes restate one impasse, and the campus is shot as backdrop, in shot and reverse shot, while the subjective instrument of the first half slackens.
Here the film is at its most conventional and its least compelled. Carl Smith, the young man Elaine is to marry, is a device. The romance is played straight for long stretches and belongs to a gentler film than the satire it grew from. What carries the section is the mother’s figure behind it: the passage from mother to daughter is the plot, and Mrs. Robinson stands across it, forbidding and lying.
Movement IV
A marriage to Carl Smith is arranged, and Benjamin drives south to find the church. The chase has its stages, a fraternity house, an empty tank, a run on foot, and the long lens shows him running hard and seeming to stay where he is. Its stages are serviceable rather than required; what is required is the place it ends.
He reaches the church in Santa Barbara as the wedding is closing, and finds himself above it, behind a sheet of glass. He pounds on it with his arms spread, shouting “Elaine!”. The figure behind glass has been the film’s image of him since the aquarium; now he is on the other side of it, calling in. Below him are the families, the groom and the bride.
Mrs. Robinson cries, “It’s too late!”, and Elaine answers, “Not for me!”. Benjamin comes down into the church, takes a cross from the wall and swings it, and when the two of them are through the doors he jams it through the handles to bar them in. The climax has real transport, half exhilaration and half horror: the bride is taken from the altar, as in the oldest romances, and the sacred is put to the service of flight.
Movement V
They run for a bus and take the back seat, she still in her wedding dress. They laugh. The film has earned the triumph, and gives it to them in full: the run, the doors barred behind them, the bus pulling away.
Then it does not cut away. The camera holds on the two faces after the laughter, and as the shot goes on the smiles fade and both faces settle into blankness. The genre required closure at this point, and the form refuses it: the duration of the shot discloses what the dialogue never says, that escape from the parents’ world is not yet knowledge of what one wants. The shot was kept and cut to this length, and what was kept is the work.
The bus carries them away as the walkway carried him in, and the film ends where it began, with Benjamin moved by something else, sitting still. The ending has been argued over since 1967, as a triumph and as an indictment, and the film supports both because it has made the rebellion real and empty at once. Mike Nichols, in his second feature, received the Academy Award for Best Director for it. What he made is a comedy whose last shot takes its laughter back.
Act III · The Twelve
The first half resists the subtractive test almost entirely. The moving walkway at the airport, the aquarium in Benjamin’s room, the diving suit at the birthday party, the raft on the pool: each sets a young man under glass or under water, and the film needs every one to make his paralysis visible before it is spoken. The Taft Hotel sequence, fumbled keys and a clerk’s question, is required, because the affair must begin as farce for its later deadness to register. The second half gives. The Berkeley section circles and restates one impasse; Carl Smith is a device; the stages of the chase are serviceable rather than required. The bus is required.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated. The prosperity of postwar suburban California offers its sons a future, summed in one word of advice from a friend of the family, that is a form of drowning, and the only adult who sees it clearly is Mrs. Robinson, who has drowned in it and takes the boy down with her out of a despair glimpsed once, in the dark, when she speaks of having studied art. The stronger disclosure is the ending’s: the rebellion is real and empty at once. What holds the axis is how much is mood. Benjamin’s anomie is rendered more than articulated, Elaine’s inner life is thin, and the satire of the parents is broad.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The elevation is comic first and, at a few points, larger. Benjamin motionless on the airport walkway against a white wall as the opening song begins; the view through the diving mask with only his breathing on the soundtrack; the cut from hauling himself onto the raft to landing on Mrs. Robinson in the hotel bed, one movement that makes the summer one surface; Benjamin at the glass above the church, arms spread, shouting “Elaine!”; and the bus. The church has real transport, half exhilaration and half horror. What holds the figure is frequency and register: much of the best work is precise deadpan comedy, an elevation of a lower order, and the long middle at Berkeley has no summit at all.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The structure that bears weight is the triangle of the son, the older woman and her daughter: the young man who must pass through the mother to reach the bride, and is cursed for it. The film builds this rather than evoking it. Mrs. Robinson forbids Elaine to him, lies of rape, and cries out at the church, “It’s too late!”, and Elaine answers, “Not for me!”: the passage from mother to daughter is the plot. The bride taken from the altar is the old abduction romance; the water, the son at the bottom of his parents’ pool, is close to a baptism refused. Most of the rest is evoked: the abduction is played half as comedy, and the Oedipal charge stays at the level of situation.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The inheritance is the Hollywood sex comedy and the coming-of-age romance, by 1967 glossy studio product. Adultery with the mother of the girl he will love is played as farce and then as desolation. The hero is passive, inarticulate and unglamorous, played by an unknown actor of thirty against the type the role seemed to call for. The cutting takes from the European new cinema: the match across months, the long lens, subjective framings. Existing pop recordings carry whole passages in place of an orchestral score. The stake: an independent picture, a second-time director, no male star, and an ending that will not call its lovers happy. The romance and the chase are classical, and the last act honours the genre the first act mocked.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is what it is like to be Benjamin: walled in, watched, unable to act. The camera is the instrument. He is framed through glass, behind the aquarium, inside the diving mask, against Mrs. Robinson’s bent leg; the long lens holds him in place as he runs. The summer montage, where cuts carry him between the pool and the hotel room with no change of expression, is the knowledge itself: the affair and the idleness are one state. The ending refuses to cut away, and the length of the shot discloses what dialogue could not. The cost is the second half, where campus shot and reverse shot and a chase cut for momentum slacken the instrument until the church.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Close to sixty years of return are the evidence, and the film’s questions have stayed open. Is the ending a triumph or an indictment? The held shot on the bus is argued over still. Is Mrs. Robinson the villain of the piece or its one tragic figure? That second reading has grown with time. Does the film satirise its generation’s revolt or celebrate it, and how far is Benjamin’s pursuit of Elaine love and how far another kind of possession? Its formal language repays study shot by shot, and its use of songs has been examined as a model. What holds the axis is that the yield gathers on a few questions, the ending and Mrs. Robinson, and that the parents and the Berkeley material are spent on first viewing.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Released in 1967, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1960s. With Bonnie and Clyde, released the same year, the film announced to a mass audience what came to be called the New Hollywood: it brought European cutting and an alienated, unheroic young protagonist into an American comedy, and found that its audience was the young. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film opened the studios to young directors and to a youth audience, the score compiled from pop records became a convention of American film for decades, and its casting changed what a leading man could look like. Much of that reach is shared with Bonnie and Clyde, and the formal borrowings came from elsewhere.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across close to sixty years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in its one version, with restorations as repair. Presence has been continuous and wide: repertory, television, every home format, teaching and constant citation, of its lines, its songs and the leg in the poster. Survival is demonstrated across that span. The surface is charged a tenth: the California of 1967, the music, the clothes and the campus are fixed to a moment, though the film is about that moment and ages largely as period.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The making bears weight through the first half almost without a break. Robert Surtees’s widescreen compositions isolate Benjamin in space; Sam O’Steen’s cutting makes the match from pool to bed and carries sound across scenes; Richard Sylbert’s design gives the house its glass, its white walls and the aquarium; focus and lens length are statements of state. The performances are exact. Anne Bancroft makes Mrs. Robinson weary, contemptuous and wounded in one register; Dustin Hoffman’s stammer and stillness are timed to the frame. The costs: the Berkeley section is ordinarily made, the campus shot as backdrop; Katharine Ross is given little to play; some comic business, the landlord and the fraternity, is broad.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the hotel farce of the first assignation, a fumbled room key and a toothbrush, and the church, where Mrs. Robinson screams and a cross is swung. One law governs both: the young man moves through a world of adults that is closed to him, and every gesture he makes against it, timid or wild, is absurd and desperate at once. The bus confirms the law by returning the triumph to stillness. The range is wide, from deadpan satire to near tragedy. The strain is in the second half: the romance with Elaine belongs to a gentler film, and Mr. Robinson’s rage and the arranged marriage to melodrama. The tones meet at the church as much by collision as by law.
Score: 7.9 / 10
A film of about 106 minutes holds consciousness, Benjamin’s fully and Mrs. Robinson’s by glimpses. It holds the family: two households, two marriages, a father’s ambitions, a mother’s despair and a daughter’s. Money and class enter as the house, the pool, the cars, the Taft, the Alfa Romeo given for graduation and the one word of advice. Sexuality and the generations are the core; the university enters as Berkeley, the sacred as a church whose cross becomes a weapon. What holds this axis lowest is what is missing in 1967: no war, no politics, no work but a future refused, and history held only in the shape of the parents’ affluence. The orders are held through one young man and two families.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.7, then The Made at 8.6, then The Living Form and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4. A film whole in its one version and continuously present for close to sixty years; a making in which camera, cutting, design and two exact performances carry the first half; a form in which glass, water and the held shot are the knowledge of a young man walled in; and a force that, with Bonnie and Clyde, opened American film to the young.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: consciousness, two families, money, sexuality and the generations are held through one young man, and there is no war, no politics, no work and history only as the parents’ affluence. Then The Sublime at 7.7: precise deadpan comedy, a few true summits, and a long middle with none. Then The Archetypal Deep at 7.8: the passage from mother to daughter is built, and the rest of the myth evoked.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 7.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four axes: The Imperishable at 8.7 clears the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 falls a tenth short, The Swerve at 8.2 three tenths short, The Unconcealment at 8.0 five tenths short and The Archetypal Deep at 7.8 seven tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.7, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.1 from a sum of 96.7, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Graduate as released by Embassy Pictures in December 1967, in its one version, about 106 minutes, in colour and widescreen, in English, from the airport walkway to the bus: directed by Mike Nichols, produced by Lawrence Turman, written by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry from the novel by Charles Webb (1963), photographed by Robert Surtees, edited by Sam O’Steen, designed by Richard Sylbert, with songs by Paul Simon sung by Simon and Garfunkel and additional score by Dave Grusin. There is no alternative cut to weigh; restorations bear on The Imperishable only. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain. Figures and claims that could not be verified are not given, among them the exact aspect ratio, the box-office rank, the year of the film’s selection for the National Film Registry, the director’s own remarks on the ending, whether the held last shot began by accident, the scene count and the timings.