![]() While many didn’t know what to make of the film, a young critic in Chicago named Roger Ebert thought it was pretty good. The Graduate opened in theaters fifty years ago today, December 21, 1967. ![]() I mulled it over a bit, and I said “While High Fidelity is a close second, I still have to go with The Graduate.” And that’s when the room went blank, and that’s when I had to recommend to a bunch of 20-somethings that they see a now-fifty-year-old film. A couple years ago we got to that point, and a student asked “So, what is your favorite movie of all-time?” It wasn’t a film class, so I wasn’t expecting the question. Usually, the question is “How do I get a job?” By the end of the period the questions usually move a little off-track. Robinson" fragments, as well as repeats of the 1966-vintage "The Sound of Silence" and "April Come She Will," and an edited extension of "Scarborough Fair/Canticle." But there were two curiosities for the completist - a high-wattage, edited rendition of "The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine" (in a style seemingly parodying the sound of Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited) and a gentle, subdued acoustic reprise of "The Sound of Silence," which was possibly the best studio rendition the duo ever gave of the song.(Fun fact: that leg belongs to Linda Gray, or so she claims.)Įvery semester, in every class I teach, I save time on the last day for a lecture I call “So, What Didn’t I Teach You?” It’s an opportunity for students to question me about anything that they were expecting to cover in the course that I missed in the prior fifteen weeks. Fans of Simon & Garfunkel likely felt cheated by the presence of the "Mrs. Macero combined this material into a musically awkward LP that somehow did its job - which, in Davis' eyes, was to introduce Simon & Garfunkel's music to the parents of their existing audience (topping the charts in the bargain, and turning Grusin's "Sunporch Cha-Cha-Cha" into a favorite of easy listening stations). And there also wasn't enough of David Grusin's instrumental music (none of which meshed with the duo's work) for an album. Thus, there wasn't enough Simon & Garfunkel material to fill even one LP side, and only about eight minutes of that were "new" recordings, and barely a quarter of that (the "Mrs. ![]() Davis turned the actual making of the album over to producer Teo Macero, who approached it with skepticism - Paul Simon and Mike Nichols had discovered that they really weren't on the same page, with Nichols rejecting "Overs" and "Punky's Dilemma," songs that ended up as highlights of the Bookends album, issued two months after The Graduate soundtrack. The album began its life because of Nichols' enthusiasm for the duo's music, and Columbia Records chief Clive Davis' ability to persuade the pair of the importance of a soundtrack LP. The Graduate soundtrack, then, merits the dubious honor of being the earliest and one of the most successful Hollywood repackagings of "found" pop songs, a formula essentially based around coercing fans to purchase soundtrack albums filled with material they already own in order to acquire the occasional new track or two. ![]() Robinson" - which only appears here as a pair of fragments - the Simon & Garfunkel songs that comprise much of the record (a series of Dave Grusin instrumentals round it out) appeared on the duo's two preceding LPs Nichols' masterstroke was to transplant those songs into his film, where they not only meshed perfectly with the story's themes of youthful rebellion and alienation (and the inner life of the central character, Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock) but also heralded a new era in movie music centered around the appropriation of past pop hits, a marketing gimmick that grew exponentially in the years to follow. With the exception of its centerpiece track, the elegiac and oft-quoted "Mrs. The soundtrack to Mike Nichols' The Graduate remains a key musical document of the late '60s, although truth be told, its impact was much less artistic than commercial (and, for that matter, more negative than positive). ![]()
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