Film Chronicle

Applying this analogy to The Graduate, we find that Nichols, forcing his story upon us with a muscular cinematic technique plucked from taste-making directors, comes on like a bunch of drunken frat brothers, and that the viewer is in the position of the broken maiden. For the record, here are some of the obvious influences on Nichols’ style (in alphabetical order) : Ingmar Bergman, Claude Chabrol, Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, Arthur Penn, Alain Resnais, François Truffaut, Agnes Varda, and Orson Welles as Grand Tutor. If we ignore the gratuitous homage to most of the above cast, we discover that Nichols’ use of deepfocus camera work to clarify and isolate the characters, his tendency to long takes and little camera movement, his mastery of blocking actors and directing dialogue, is similar to Welles’ command of these factors in Citizen Kane, and we commend Nichols on his choice of mentor.

But most of the critics’ reservations pertain to the “reality” of his characters; and here we can change Nichols’ remark to “eunuchs watching an adroit seduction,” for Nichols elicits sympathy for his protagonist by making Ben’s environment unsympathetic. The reason Ben never trusts anyone over thirty may be that he never meets anyone under forty—until Elaine comes along. Like two cellmates, they almost have to become friends. But Elaine can’t be totally trusted either: she believes her mother, whom she must know to be a neurotic alcoholic, when told that the liaison was Ben’s idea (the opposite is true), and considers getting married to both Ben and a blond cipher she knows at college.

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Richard Corliss

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Applying this analogy to The Graduate, we find that Nichols, forcing his story upon us with a muscular cinematic technique plucked from taste-making directors, comes on like a bunch of drunken frat brothers, and that the viewer is in the position of the broken maiden. For the record, here are some of the obvious influences on Nichols’ style (in alphabetical order) : Ingmar Bergman, Claude Chabrol, Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, Arthur Penn, Alain Resnais, François Truffaut, Agnes Varda, and Orson Welles as Grand Tutor. If we ignore the gratuitous homage to most of the above cast, we discover that Nichols’ use of deepfocus camera work to clarify and isolate the characters, his tendency to long takes and little camera movement, his mastery of blocking actors and directing dialogue, is similar to Welles’ command of these factors in Citizen Kane, and we commend Nichols on his choice of mentor.

But most of the critics’ reservations pertain to the “reality” of his characters; and here we can change Nichols’ remark to “eunuchs watching an adroit seduction,” for Nichols elicits sympathy for his protagonist by making Ben’s environment unsympathetic. The reason Ben never trusts anyone over thirty may be that he never meets anyone under forty—until Elaine comes along. Like two cellmates, they almost have to become friends. But Elaine can’t be totally trusted either: she believes her mother, whom she must know to be a neurotic alcoholic, when told that the liaison was Ben’s idea (the opposite is true), and considers getting married to both Ben and a blond cipher she knows at college.