This review first appeared in The Spectator on 15 August 1968.
In the United States The Graduate is already as much a phenomenon as a film. Critics have been treating it as an essential communiqué from the war between the generations; box- office takings are climbing towards the ultimate heights occupied by Julie Andrews and The Sound of Music; across the campuses they seem to have stopped identifying with Clyde Barrow and to be claiming as their own Benjamin Braddock, little Yankee brother of the Morgan who was a suitable case for treatment. Actually, though The Graduate is utterly unlike Bonnie and Clyde as a film, it is perhaps not so far away from it as a hit: romantic, in some unexpected ways puritanical, and getting through to its audience at the soft and sensitive point between inarticulacy and the urge to rebellion.
Perhaps the trick can be repeated here; possibly not.
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