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"The Graduate" was not a film for my generation. It came out in 1967, three years before I was born. It wasn't quite a film for my father's generation either, he was just a little too old. But both of us have loved that movie. For decades, my Dad wanted an Alfa-Romeo Spider Quadrifoglio like the one Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin drove across the Golden Gate Bridge. He finally got one in the 1990s (silver, not red) and spent 10 years zipping around Manhattan doing acting jobs. Hey, it's never too late.
I first saw "The Graduate" just before I graduated from high school, and again just after I left college and was struggling to find a job. It was easy to identify with a guy like Ben, whose dreams were conflicting with an ugly reality. "Plastics." Ugh.
But young or old, we were blown away by Anne Bancroft's seductress, Mrs. Robinson. OK, so the character was a self-absorbed scheming witch. We could live with that. I'm not sufficiently aware of the role of women in film to know what she did for female sexuality on the screen. But I know what it did for my own appreciation of female sexuality. You don't have to be Pauline Kael to have figured that one out. And unlike so many of Hollywood's liberated ladies today, Bancroft had class and sass. She's just died, at the age of 73.