Benjamin
Braddock (played by
Dustin Hoffman): “Oh my God!”
Mrs.
Robinson (played by
Anne Bancroft): “Pardon?”
Benjamin:
“Oh no, Mrs. Robinson. Oh no.”
Mrs.
Robinson: “What's wrong?”
Benjamin:
“Mrs. Robinson, you didn't... I mean, you didn't expect...”
Mrs.
Robinson: “What?”
Benjamin:
“I mean, you didn't really think I'd do something like that.”
Mrs.
Robinson: “Like what?”
Benjamin:
“What do you think?”
Mrs.
Robinson: “Well, I don't know.”
Benjamin:
“For god's sake, Mrs. Robinson. Here we are. You got me into your house. You
give me a drink. You... put on music. Now you start opening up your personal
life to me and tell me your husband won't be home for hours.”
Mrs.
Robinson: “So?”
Benjamin:
“Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me.”
Mrs.
Robinson: [laughs] “Huh?”
Benjamin:
“Aren't you?”—The Graduate (1967), screenplay by Calder Willingham and
Buck Henry, based on the novel by Charles Webb, directed by Mike Nichols
Anne Bancroft played a heroine—Helen Keller’s indomitable
teacher, Annie Sullivan, in her Oscar-winning turn in The Miracle
Worker—but in The Graduate she
virtually invented an archetype. Long before “Cougar Den” became a Saturday Night Live skit, or before Demi
Moore, Susan Sarandon or other actresses of a certain age took up with younger
men, she popularized the notion of the cougar in Mike Nichols’ film, which
premiered on this date simultaneously in New York and Los Angeles.
It wasn’t the first time Hollywood had paired an
older woman with a younger man, mind you: Sunset
Boulevard, for instance, had Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond. But that didn’t
have the pervasive influence on America’s sexual consciousness as The Graduate, for several reasons: 1)
the Hollywood censorship code was still operating; 2) the hold that the silent-screen
star had on screenwriter-gigolo Joe Gillis was monetary rather than sexual; 3)
Desmond’s allure had faded a long time ago; and 4) she was, most of all,
bonkers.
The above scene in Dustin Hoffman’s film debut
couldn’t be more different from the one that Billy Wilder created. It’s the
climax of a whole series of events (starting with one that Benjamin doesn’t
mention here—Mrs. Robinson barging into his room at his own home, when he wants to escape
from his party), all carefully orchestrated. Mrs. Robinson is insouciant,
teasing, fake-innocent—utterly in control. Benjamin doesn’t stand a chance.
The blogger at Noir Whale picks up on one neat trick
of the film: This scene was “textbook film noir, in a non-noir setting,” with
Mrs. Robinson as the femme fatale and
Benjamin as her helpless male prey. Yet the scene gains in daring because of its gender inversion
of a familiar trope of film and literature (e.g., Les Liaisons Dangereuses): an older man cunningly, step by step,
taking a young woman’s virginity.
For more than a few male viewers, the daring in all
of this made Mrs. Robinson more desirable than her daughter. Elaine might have
been beautiful, but she was young and innocent—and for a certain type of male,
such a woman doesn’t have the appeal that a more experienced one does.
The film’s sleight of hand in this scene in regard
to its principal figure (for make no mistake—Mrs. Robinson is not only the
force that alters Benjamin’s aimless, frightened stasis in facing adulthood,
but also the most complicated character in the movie) was as slick as its
now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t nudity. In actuality, Bancroft was only six years
older than Hoffman, who appeared younger than his 30 years.
Nichols might have been acclaimed as a harbinger of “The
New Hollywood,” but in manipulating the age difference between Bancroft and
Hoffman, he stood squarely in a tradition between Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (in which Jessie
Royce Landis, just seven years older than Cary Grant, played his mother) and Robert
Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump (in which Sally
Field, just six years after playing Tom Hanks’ girlfriend in Punchline, now played his mom).
By today’s standards, The Graduate suggested far more than it showed in its scenes with
Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson. But it had swung the pendulum far, far away from
the likes of Dr. Dolittle (which, as
I noted in a post from yesterday, premiered only the day before). Dr. Dolittle treated the animal kingdom; Mrs.
Robinson, in her predatory inclinations, belonged
to it. (At the time of shooting, Nichols had been reading Henry James’ “The Beast in the Jungle,” a novella about a young man waiting for an unusual destiny, and it inspired his decision to
have Bancroft clad in animal prints).
One original choice for the role of Mrs. Robinson,
Doris Day, might have been flying into the face of her wholesome stereotype had she appeared, but
she could not see herself “rolling around in the sheets with a young man half
my age.” Ava Gardner, who was also approached by Nichols about taking on the
role, shared the character’s strong taste for alcohol and young men, but she
took herself out of the running because she didn't consider herself much of an actress, thereby leaving the field open to Bancroft. The latter
matched Stifler’s mom in American Pie
as a comical cougar, but—in a sign of her greatness as an actress—brought
infinitely greater shadings of disappointment and buried resentments.
