As summer arrives, graduates across the country will be pondering about their future, and many should seriously consider a career in plastics. If that sentence means nothing to you, it’s all the more reason you need to watch Mike Nichols‘ “The Graduate,” and there’s never been a better time to see it for the first time (or give it another viewing).
Starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft, the film follows a graduate with some post-collegiate malaise, who winds up caught in a love triangle of sorts between an older woman and her daughter. But that’s just scratching the service of this film, that’s one of the landmarks of ’60s cinema and one of the most influential films of that decade. Moreover, it remains a great piece of filmmaking. Here’s the official synopsis:
Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) has just finished college and is already lost in a sea of confusion as he wonders what to do with his life. He returns to his parents’ luxurious Beverly Hills home, where he idles away the summer floating in the pool and brooding in silence. He is rescued from the boredom when he is seduced into a clandestine affair with a middle-aged married friend of his parents, Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft). That liaison is soon complicated by Benjamin’s infatuation with her college-age daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross).
While the movie recently landed on The Criterion Collection looking better than ever, the 35mm camera negative the boutique label used has also helped create a new 4K DCP print that will screen in the U.K. starting on June 23rd. Check out the new trailer below. [The Independent]