The Graduate

The Graduate directed by well-known Mike Nichols along with the brilliant screenplay writers Calder Willingham and Buck Henry. This particular film was based on Charles Webb’s 1963 novel adaptation that was also named The Graduate. The release date of this film was set for December 21, 1967. The sixties were known to be the decade filled with new surprising occurrences. Such aspects regarding the developing trends of fashion, new various musical styles, civil rights, gay and lesbian liberation, assassinations like JFK and Martin Luther King, the ongoing war in Vietnam and the counterculture of the youth in the United States during this decade.

The Graduate reflects the values of American youth in that it tells the story of Benjamin Braddock played by Dustin Hoffman, who is a little worried about his future. It seems to me as if his goal after graduating college never progresses. As innocent in a sophisticated society, he is seen by his elders as a means to fulfill their own ambitions, while he himself is trying to search out an honest and sincere way to live his life. Benjamin has difficulty in relating to the world of his parents, from which he feels cut off by invisible barriers. During this course of time for Benjamin his family support and environment have been lacking. The pressure from his parents’ generation to enter a workforce to which he feels he has no connection in creating the sense of self entitlement but also as a perfect allegory for the relationship between the old and the new for every subsequent generation. It comes out of a specific time in the later 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.

When the film was released in 1967, it became something of a film for the 18-25 age group audience. It represented a breakthrough for Hollywood with these young people- students and others went to see it again and again. There came a time when the...