to anyone seeing it for the first time, “The Graduate” must seem as dated as “Stagecoach.” A boy, a Mrs. Robinson, something about plastics. Dustin Hoffman’s unlined face. The cloyingly sweet Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack. What did these musty hieroglyphics once signify?
For viewers who remember it as part of their upbringing, “The Graduate” presents an entirely different problem. Now that it’s hit its 30th birthday, the film throws our ’60s shortsightedness in our face. How sheepish one feels, realizing the movie is no work of genius. In fact, what was once an all-important signpost to adulthood is really little more than a simple romantic comedy whose “countercultural” message, insofar as it has one, is decidedly retrograde.
Or perhaps “The Graduate” is really a tragedy, considering that what we thought we were watching was something altogether different than what’s actually on the film. (Women, in particular, may be disappointed to rediscover that Ben’s coming of age requires them to participate from the wrong side of the bed sheet.)
Never mind that “The Sound of Silence” may be the most laughable musical backdrop for a seduction ever recorded. Or that Anne Bancroft, cast as a middle-aged parent, is a mere six years older than Dustin Hoffman, who’s supposed to be 20. Or that from the vantage point of ’90s adulthood, Ben’s “alienation” seems downright dreamy.
What’s alarming is that the film, which so perfectly captured its era, seems to have turned on us. No longer a blueprint for liberation, it’s practically an anthem to conformity.
That’s remarkable, considering that if you were picking through today’s cultural altar, you’d have to take the entire “Brady Bunch” oeuvre, and throw in Kurt Cobain, to come close to conjuring up the equivalent of “The Graduate” as a zeitgeist land mine. Released in 1967, “The Graduate” made the third highest box-office profit of any American film up to that time. The film unleashed Dustin Hoffman upon the world (it was actually his third movie) and got Mike Nichols an Oscar for directing (the best-movie Oscar went to “In the Heat of the Night”). All things considered, it’s had a pretty amazing shelf life — a good 15 years or so of near-deserved cultdom before its mustiness began to show.
Passively misogynistic and emotionally muddled, the story is about a young man who has an affair with an older woman and then, growing tired of her, becomes determined to marry her virginal daughter. Only she, it seems, can rescue him from the sordid experience of having slept with her mother.
Well, that’s a pretty odd fable to seed a fresh, radicalized youth movement with, to feed a generation needing to replace its parents’ status-conscious, material-based dogma for living. Indeed, the film’s view of marriage, sexuality and the suburbs is closer to stodgy old John Updike than Erica Jong. What gave “The Graduate” its long-standing appeal was that it proffered a chance for Ben and his real-life contemporaries to literally fuck the parent images in his life, destroy them and — having seemingly earned the moral upper hand — step into their shoes. Alas, to our naive ’60s eyes, this seemed revolutionary.
Today “The Graduate’s” most remembered phrase has lost its irony. (We’re all in plastics now, aren’t we?) Ben’s parents, rather than hypocrites and conformists, just seem like people who came a few minutes too late to the New Frontier. As for you, Mrs. Robinson, it’s clear that Bancroft outclassed not only her own hateful role but pretty much the whole film.
Even now the movie is not without its charms. For my money, the scene in which Ben appears at his parents’ barbecue, decked out from head to foot in scuba gear like a mute space explorer, is one of the best evocations of alienation — youthful or otherwise — ever captured on film.
Of course, Ben is an explorer from another planet — the planet of teenagers — let loose among the strange culture of adults. It’s because of this that he struck a chord with viewers for so long. Nichols places him underwater a lot, as though he really were a creature who literally can’t breathe the earth’s atmosphere.
Indeed, the power of Ben’s career claustrophobia, the horror he feels as people keep asking what his plans are, may last another 30 years. “Do you know what you’re going to do?” they say, as though he has to choose one thing — folding a piece of paper, bouncing a ball — and then do that one thing over and over for the rest of his life.
In “The Graduate” we remember, Ben rebels against that model of the world, racing to steal Elaine away from the altar, beating off her family and her would-be future (and his) with a crucifix he pulls off the wall of the church. One of the first ’60s movie characters to say “Fuck You” to the Establishment, Ben lives in our memory as a rebel who hijacked his own awful fate.
On actual celluloid, it’s a different story.
You don’t need Nichols’ one moment of supreme, painful insight, that awful, final glimpse of the couple “escaping” at the back of the bus, barely able to look each other in the eye, to see that nothing Ben does is particularly heroic. Rather than striking a blow for self-determination, he ends up with the exact girl his parents have picked out for him.
He barely knows her, but he pursues her because she’s everything her mother isn’t: respectable, safe, ready to forgive him for having no vision at all.
there are at least a dozen mainstream American comedies made over the last 15 years that rank among the best movies ever. A few have gained some recognition (“Tootsie,” “My Cousin Vinnie,” “Broadcast News”), but a whole lot more (“Soap Dish,” “My Blue Heaven,” “Gremlins 2,” “Get Shorty”) have languished in some nether world of cinematic reputation, not quirky enough to be cult classics and not loud enough to be gigantic popular successes.
And yet they wear well. Unlike the “great” Oscar-grabbing movies of the time (“Gandhi,” say, or “Amadeus” or “Kiss of the Spider Woman” or “Places in the Heart”), they reward repeated viewings. They’re funny and smart; even more remarkable, they each emerged from the big studio sausage factory that was at the same time producing some of the lamest glossy movies ever created.
“All of Me” may not be the best of these comedies (I suspect “Tootsie” is, although with a whole lot less Charles Durning it would have been even better) but it has the funniest 10 minutes of screen time since the movies started talking.
And the most unpromising premise. Lily Tomlin is a sickly rich person who wishes her soul to be transferred to someone else’s body just at the moment of her death. Richard Libertini is the guru who will make it all happen; Steve Martin is the skeptical lawyer who is working for Tomlin. Complications ensue. Tomlin dies, her soul moves to an odd brass bowl, which is then knocked out a window. The bowl hits Martin on the head, and suddenly Lily Tomlin is inhabiting the body of Steve Martin (with Steve Martin still in it).
A power struggle ensues. The right side (Tomlin) does not wish to cooperate with the left side (Martin). Both personalities are angry, confused, inept. It is an astonishing illusion: Your brain knows that it’s only watching Steve Martin hurling his limbs around, but nothing you see on-screen confirms that. His left foot moves bravely outward, intent on getting back to his office; his right foot remains glued to the ground. His right hand clings to a parking meter desperately; his left hand just as desperately tries to pry it off. All the while, he is engaged in a furious argument with himself, by turns sarcastic, seductive, wheedling, raging. Occasionally he becomes aware of his surroundings and attempts to pretend that his behavior is some form of transient muscular disorder, but just as quickly he plunges back into debate, snapping off cruel quips and then slapping himself, throwing himself at doorways while dragging one leg behind as though he had an angry terrier attached to his ankle, spinning suddenly on his heel like a balletic infantryman, walking three steps and screaming “no!” and whirling around again.
The rest of the movie is a folly of schizophrenia and narcissism, as the two people inside the same body slowly fall in love with each other through a barrage of plot twists and one-liners. It is sweet-natured to the end, even letting the villain off the hook, and the very last sequence, as the credits roll, concludes in a perfect coda of ungainly joy.
for those of us who grew up in polite, suburban, nicey-nice families — in mine, there were no raised voices, no verbal jousting — there’s nothing more transfixing than being around people who can really let fly, who leap into arguments as if things (people, ideas, art) matter. The sound of hot dispute, weirdly enough, can begin to seem like the sound of love. There’s zero love lost, on the surface anyway, between George and Martha, the mightily warring couple in Edward Albee’s Tony Award-winning 1962 play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” They go at it like King Kong and Godzilla right from the start, clubbing each other over the head with gleeful scorn, and leaving huge patches of scorched earth. (Martha is furious that George, an academic, hasn’t advanced at the college where her father is president; George coolly observes Martha’s slide into various forms of debauchery.) “If you existed, I’d divorce you,” she spits at him. “Martha, rubbing alcohol for you?” he asks in retort, fixing drinks for guests.
A few clunky attempts to “broaden” “Woolf” for the screen aside, Mike Nichols, directing his first film, has the right instincts — he keeps close to the abrasive immediacy of Albee’s language. Even better, he coaxes nearly miraculous performances out of Elizabeth Taylor (who won an Oscar for this) and Richard Burton. They both ooze a riveting amount of shabby-genteel, gone-to-hell glamour. That’s not blood running through their veins — it’s booze, spite, nicotine and fear. Taylor and Burton seem turned on by each other’s performances, and that fact not only puts wind in the film’s sails but helps undergird some essential truths about their relationship. “Martha and I are merely exercising,” George says to a hapless young couple (George Segal and Sandy Dennis) who drop by for a nightcap and are sucked into the whirlpool of George-and-Martha agonistes. “We’re walking what’s left of our wits.” In other words, George and Martha’s intellects are all they have left. They rejoice in their can-you-top-this ability to mind-fuck each other.
Albee’s play has some problems that the screen version can’t avoid, notably the way Albee lards his theme about “truth and illusion” with some overly broad (and overly Oedipal) speechifying. But there is still something wildly entertaining about watching Taylor and Burton, two actors at the top of their craft, wickedly knock the crap out of each other — particularly now, when so many young filmmakers’ idea of snappy, intelligent, “adult” dialogue is sub-Tarantino riffs on the relative merits of, say, Doritos and Cheese Doodles. George and Martha may torment each other, but “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” is never torture to watch. “You have ugly talents,” George says, almost admiringly, to Martha. So does this movie.
sand. An ocean of sand, without beginning or end, motionless, stretching across a vast screen. The strangeness of the harsh, limitless Earth, the strangeness of a human soul, blown up into a scale beyond familiarity, beyond knowing. A single drone note sounds, always, under “Lawrence of Arabia”: The world is deep, deeper than we had been aware. It is the only movie I’ve ever seen that makes it impossible to forget that we are all crawling around on a big ball of metal and gas hurtling through a void.
Every art form has its “virtue,” a special property, a single thing it does better than any other. Film’s virtue is showing pictures of the world. And the pictures in David Lean’s masterpiece are exalted. No other film I know — not “Eraserhead,” not “Gone With the Wind,” not “Red Desert” — overwhelms the eye, and the mind’s eye, like “Lawrence.” You drown in it. It is stupefying. You stumble out of the movie — whose length is as majestic as its subject — dazed by a vision of implacable splendor and horror, dazed by vision itself.
In one sense, then, “Lawrence” is “about” nothing but the desert. But it is also about one of the most enigmatic figures in history — T.E. Lawrence, a highly educated British army officer who, operating on his own initiative, led Arab tribesmen in a guerrilla war against the Turks in World War I, returned to England, wrote an amazing, unfathomable book called “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” joined the Royal Air Force and died in 1935 in a motorcycle accident. Like Nietzsche, Dostoevsky’s Ivan or Conrad’s Kurtz, Lawrence strived to be, as he put it in a letter, “greater than mankind” — to somehow break through the limitations of ordinary existence by sheer will. Did he succeed? Fail? He struggled, mightily, then died.
Perhaps an actor can only capture gleaming facets of a diamond-hard personality like this. In a performance that becomes more evocative, more densely textured with each viewing, Peter O’Toole captures dozens of them. They glint and shine for an instant, then vanish.
Some critics have assailed “Lawrence” for being murky, muddled, unsure of what it is saying. There is some justice to this criticism. But this is that rare film whose weaknesses are not only swallowed up by its vast, disturbing ambition, but somehow become part of its strengths. Lawrence’s dark, inchoate vision does not fit neatly into the “epic war film” box. It does not fit into any box. His goals are turned against themselves, alien, never entirely known even to their possessor. They stand above and outside. Straining, sweating, “Lawrence of Arabia” reaches toward them.
Two mysteries collide in this film: The earth and the human soul. It doesn’t resolve them. It couldn’t. We can’t. It is a telescope aimed at the unknown. It is a huge film.
“this is Elvis” isn’t the best movie I’ve ever seen. Actually, it’s a pretty awful
thing, a documentary-docudrama hybrid narrated by the King himself,
speaking from beyond the grave (through an Elvis impersonator who doesn’t
much sound like him). It has actors re-creating moments from Elvis’ life in
scenes that have all the production values and drama of a “re-enactment” on
“Unsolved Mysteries.”
And yet.
The only time I ever fell in love in a movie theater, I was
watching “This is Elvis.” And I didn’t fall in love with my date. (Who am I
kidding? What date?) I fell in love with Elvis Presley, who had been dead
for four years.
By the time I came along, Elvis was just another one of those washed-up
guys who’d been famous for a long time and had a TV special every once in a
while, like Andy Williams or Jonathan Winters. I knew the story — the
lunging crowds, the screaming girls, the anti-rock ‘n’ roll speechifying. I
knew about all the records he’d sold and the endless devotion of his fans.
I just never really got it. He’d always seemed, well, sort of tame. You
know, let me be your teddy bear.
Sitting in a theater as a teenager, I figured I’d see more of what I’d
already seen. I sat through the ridiculous early scenes, starting — as
post-1977 Elvis books and movies always do — with the fateful keeling over
in the potty scene, then rushing through his childhood and adolescence,
where he’s portrayed as sort of a Huck Finn with a guitar, not the pretty,
sensitive boy who was much clucked-over by the neighborhood women.
Then comes his television debut, on Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey’s “Stage Show.”
The kinescope clip is a pretty common bit of Elvisianna now. But it wasn’t
in 1981, and I’d never seen it. Elvis comes out in a dark suit and white
tie and launches into “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” For most of the song he’s
in close-up, but at the instrumental break, he and the camera both back up.
Now visible head to toe, he does this frenetic, bouncing, standing-in-one
spot dance as he furiously strums his guitar. As he walks back to the mike,
he turns his gum over in his mouth before singing the next verse, actually
a segue into “Flip, Flop and Fly.”
I felt like I’d taken speed. My heart pounded. I wanted to tear my chair
out of the theater floor and throw it. I wanted to head-butt somebody or
drive 100 miles an hour. Imagine seeing that performance in early 1956,
when singers were gracious, polite and subdued, before people got used to
the idea that one might punctuate his performance by, say, biting the head
off a chicken. He was just so damn wild.
It’s downhill from there. Within minutes, he’s in tails, singing to a dog
on Steve Allen’s show. He appears to be stoned on an interview show called
“Hy Gardner Calling!” The long, dreary decline that occupied 21 of the 22
years Elvis was famous — interrupted only for one night, the magnificent
1968 “comeback special” — is well-documented. And now, Elvis is one of our
national jokes. The impersonators and the wedding chapels and I saw him in a
supermarket in Kalamazoo ha ha ha.
It’s his own fault. He lived like a damn fool and squandered a prodigious
talent. But it’s a shame that he’s remembered more for shooting at TVs and
eating disgusting sandwiches than for his inimitable singing (sorry, lame
impersonators) and his astonishing charisma. I remembered him that way too,
until I saw “This is Elvis.” It taught me a whole new way to see, and what
more can you ask from a night at the movies?
i first saw Carol Reed’s “The Third Man” on late-night television, during one of the spates of classic film watching with which I whiled away my early teens. It struck me as startlingly real, defying both the dreamy, confected world of the rest of the ’30s and ’40′s movies I’d been devouring and the sullen, rebellious romanticism film had inherited from the ’60s. It seemed like the creation of a sensibility terribly old and wise, and most of all very European; it was the very essence of world-weary sophistication. In it, Holly Martins, an American author of pulp westerns — played by Joseph Cotten, tall, brash and handsome — arrives in post-World War II Vienna expecting to meet an old buddy, Harry Lime. Lime, it turns out, has just been killed in an automobile accident, and Martins decides there’s something fishy about the situation, something that only a bright, irreverent Yankee has the wherewithal to uncover.
Based on Graham Greene’s novel, with a screenplay also written by Greene, “The Third Man” boasts his trademark of moral confusion coupled with a devious plot. Reed gives the movie a weird, exhausted, paranoid atmosphere in which the rest of the characters observe Holly’s “investigation” with the impassive tolerance of adults humoring a deluded child. The skewed frames; the gnomish middle-aged Viennese with their myriad secrets, tiny dogs and fussy clothes; the inky, cobblestone streets and the interiors — whether battered or ornate, they’re always strangely hollow — combine to make a menacing, alien environment where Holly is immediately, and obliviously, over his head.
As Harry, Orson Welles shows how easily Holly’s energy and initiative could curdle into evil if only he were a bit smarter, too smart in fact, for anyone’s good. Harry’s satanic charm — he gets the movie’s best speech, a jaunty bit about the art of the Medicis vs. the Swiss and their cuckoo clocks — gives the movie just enough additional gas to power it through its famous sewer chase with that gorgeous, indelible shot of Harry’s fingers reaching through the grate.
Holly may be the protagonist of “The Third Man” (such a movie could never have a “hero,” or for that matter even an “antihero”), but (Alida) Valli, as Anna, Harry’s grieving lover, is its soul. Playing a principled woman who learns that the man she loved was entirely bad, and that even this doesn’t matter in the end, Valli has a dignity seldom afforded to women in movies — her inner life surpasses those of the men around her. If the bruised-little-boy heart of noir finally grew up, it might wear a face as beautiful and sad as hers. The sewer chase may be the most famous sequence in “The Third Man,” but I’ve always remembered her cool, solitary walk down the long graveyard road at the movie’s end, her deliberate indifference to Holly’s offer of comfort. It’s the walk of a woman who knows herself, however painful that knowledge, and she stands taller than any cowboy.
