Appraising The Graduate

The popular success in 1967 of The Graduate was immediate and total; at the time only Gone with the Wind and The Sound of Music were bigger box-office winners. Yet such phenomenal success came at a price: On the film''s 40th anniversary director Mike Nichols claimed that The Graduate had been whipped away by a young audience hungry for countercultural documents. This study the first monograph on The Graduate explores how popular and subsequent critical reception deflected a full understanding of the film''s complex point of view which satirizes everything in its path--especially Benjamin and Elaine its young heroes. The text explores how the film offers not the happy ending some imagine but a corrosive and satirical vision of humanity.