The Spectator’s original review of The Graduate, directed by Mike Nichols

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.

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