Movie Review: ‘The Graduate’ still gets very high grades

Benjamin Braddock forever will be a little worried about his future.

And for good reason. If he’s not quite sure where he’s going at the start of director Mike Nichols’ 1967 classic “The Graduate” — which Turner Classic Movies shows Wednesday, Aug. 14, as part of a “Summer Under the Stars” day devoted to Anne Bancroft — he doesn’t have much cause to be any more certain in the picture’s famous climax, though it might appear on the surface that he’s charted his course.

What happens in-between is the stuff of which iconic movies are made. Dustin Hoffman had been acting professionally for several years, largely on television, when Nichols made him an immediate star by casting him as very nervous college grad Benjamin (a part for which Robert Redford, Hoffman’s later “All the President’s Men” co-star, had tested).

After brilliantly setting up the privileged background from which Benjamin hails (the scuba suit in the swimming pool!), Nichols and screenwriters Buck Henry — who also has a great cameo as a hotel desk clerk — and Calder Willingham shift to the main story, the seduction of Benjamin by calculating family friend Mrs. Robinson (a sterling Bancroft, in a legendary role that Doris Day reportedly turned down).

Benjamin has his doubts about the secret affair, and those only are amplified when he reconnects with unsuspecting Robinson daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross, whose contribution to the film tends to be underrated beside her fellow “Graduate” stars).

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel also are invaluable to “The Graduate,” Nichols having made the inspired choice to use their mood-enhancing music throughout the picture. The filmmaker also cast every other character perfectly, from William Daniels and Elizabeth Wilson as Benjamin’s social-standing-minded parents to Murray Hamilton as Mr. Robinson and Norman Fell as a landlord who simply doesn’t like tenant Benjamin. And as a graduation-party attendee, Walter Brooke always can be identified for one sincerely delivered word of advice: “Plastics.”