PLASTICS! RE-SEDUCED BY "THE GRADUATE" AND BORED WITH "SEDUCED BY MRS. ROBINSON....."

         Eons and eons ago........as we wandered through the Temple University student lounges, staggered at the amount of reading assignments to plow through, we overheard a conversation between two fellow students:

           GIRL:  Have you seen 'The Graduate'?

           BOY:  No.

           GIRL: (In reverent awe....)  Oh.....Baby!!

           That's all we (or anyone else) needed to hear. For the Baby Boomers hitting college, "The Graduate" nailed the zeitgeist to the wall.......the struggle for self-identity, the struggle for self-worth, the eternal rebellion against the materialistic (and increasingly suspect) values of the generation that spawned us........(and also, don't discount the attraction of running off with the Hot Babe Next Door...)

             Best of all......making the movie an immediate sensation as well as a timeless classic......the off-the-wall, against-the-grain completely bonkers casting of the unknown,  diminutive, homely Dustin Hoffman......in a role designed for a dashing young suntanned Blonde God Movie Star.......

             This guy looked like us.......he sounded like us.......he was us.

              And so "The Graduate" (1967)  took its generation by storm. The rest, as they say, is cinema history.

              Almost 51 years later.......does it still hold up?

              How could it not?  The razor sharp, exquisite timing between Hoffman and Anne Bancroft......the practically scientific precision of Mike Nichols' widescreen compositions, positioning his actors for visuals that accentuated all the dry humor amid the festering unrest, anger and alienation.

               The only bad news for us personally........Nichols' groundbreaking use of Simon and Garfunkel songs on the soundtrack put the symphonic score in retreat for over a decade. But so many filmmakers who aped Nichols by flooding their movies with pop music never did it with the skill of "The Graduate".......they slapped jukebox tunes on their films like Post-it notes, with barely any connection between the music and the story content.

                "The Graduate" still stands proud as a brilliant accomplishment in social satire, and contemporary drama that resonates today more than ever........(even the predatory Mrs. Robinson now enjoys a more sympathetic view in light of the female empowerment movement)

                  Which brings us to "Seduced By Mrs. Robinson: How 'The Graduate' Became the Touchstone Of A Generation" by Beverly Gray  (2017)

                    We'd normally adore a book that would exhaustively detail the genesis and making of 'The Graduate' as well as examining it in terms of current our current life and history.......

                    Sorry to say, we found the book to be a dry, mostly by-the-numbers slog.......like a dreary graduate school thesis that never ends. Beverly Gray plows through facts, personal observations and a numbing list of already well known films that offer homages to "The Graduate".......all of it in tedious, plodding prose.

                   A few gems pop up in the book here and there........a preening Steve McQueen bemoaning the rise of ordinary-looking leading men like Hoffman........the revelation (previously revealed by Hoffman himself) that his beloved-by-critics,  Christ-like pose against the huge church window came primarily from the Pastor's angry warning against accidentally breaking the glass by pounding on it....the strange life and work of Charles Webb, the author of the original novel.....and the backstory behind those legendary expressions of uneasy ambivalence on Hoffman and Katherine Ross's faces as they ride off in the bus together......

                   As for Gray's sleep-inducing, shot-by-shot description of the film, from beginning to end, and her encyclopedic rundown of every movie and TV show that ever referenced "The Graudate"......we couldn't skip through the pages fast enough.

                  So here's to you, Mrs. Robinson.....BQ loves you more than you can know. For the film, eternally a 5 star (****) FIND OF FINDS......for the book, 1 & 1/2 stars (* 1/2).......stick with the movie Graduate.....the book's only freshman-level blah-blah-blah.