The Graduate

Great movies remain themselves over the generations; they retain a serene sense of their own identity. Lesser movies are captives of their time. They get dated and lose their original focus and power. ``The Graduate'' is a lesser movie. It comes out of a specific time in the late 1960s when parents stood for stodgy middle-class values, and ``the kids'' were joyous rebels at the cutting edge of the sexual and political revolutions. Benjamin Braddock (…

…stars out of delight for the material it contains; to watch it today is like opening a time capsule. To know that the movie once spoke strongly to a generation is to understand how deep the generation gap ran during that extraordinary time in the late 1960s. There were true rebels in movies of the period , but Benjamin Braddock was not one of them. I wonder how long it took him to get into plastics.