Film Forum

(1967) “You’re trying to seduce me, Mrs. Robinson... Aren’t you?” Student unrest in bourgeois clothing, as Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock, adrift after college, is craftily seduced by a woman of his parents’ generation: Anne Bancroft’s icily-assured friend-of-the-family Mrs. Robinson (actually only six years Hoffman’s senior). So it’s understandable that Ben’s dream girl Katharine Ross is a bit startled to learn that he’s been sleeping with... her mother. Arguably, no other movie of the 60s — not even Bonnie and Clyde or Easy Rider — turned counterculture angst into popular culture. The biggest box office surprise of the decade, Oscar winner for second-time-out director Nichols (among seven nominations), and Hoffman’s star-making breakout role, with Simon & Garfunkel’s score starting a new trend in soundtrack music and one anthologizable moment after another: the pool-side graduation party packed with advice-offering adults (“Plastics!”); that famous leg shot; the jittery hotel rendezvous, co-screenwriter Buck Henry’s matter-of-factly querying, “Are you here for an affair, sir?”; the interrupted wedding, with the crucifix crossbar; and the lingering “what happens now?” close-up on the bus. Adapted by Henry and Calder Willingham from the Charles Webb novel. 4K DCP restoration. Approx. 105 min.

A RIALTO PICTURES RELEASE

Reviews

“THE MOST POPULAR ROMANTIC COMEDY OF THE 1960s! 
Remains a film of imagination, creativity, beauty, humor, tension and moral seriousness. 
AN ARTISTIC BLOCKBUSTER!”
– Michael Wilmington

“See the grotesque materialism through the eyes of Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock. Be agog at Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Robinson in some of the most hilariously icky seduction scenes ever filmed. See Mike Nichols (with help from Simon & Garfunkel) take control of the Zeitgeist. See the mood go dark—darker than you remember.” 
– David Edelstein, New York Magazine

“The funniest American comedy of the year... Hoffman is so painfully awkward and ethical that we are forced to admit we would act pretty much as he does, even in his most extreme moments. Bancroft, in a tricky role, is magnificently sexy, shrewish, and self-possessed enough to make the seduction convincing... Benjamin’s acute honesty and embarrassment are so accurately drawn that we hardly know whether to laugh or to look inside ourselves.”
– Roger Ebert

“A director’s picture because even its mistakes are proofs of a personal style... Moving precisely because its hero passes from a premature maturity to an innocence regained, an idealism reconfirmed. That he is so much out of his time and place makes him more of an individual and less of a type. Even the overdone caricatures that surround the three principals cannot diminish the cruel beauty of this love story.”
– Andrew Sarris

“The most popular romantic comedy of the 1960s is an unusual movie, an artistic blockbuster… Suggests that youthful love and idealism are intense and dangerous, circumscribed with anxiety. Yet, for the audience in 1967, the end of the movie was taken as a triumph: Ben’s and Elaine’s victory over their parents… Remains a film of imagination, creativity, beauty, humor, tension and moral seriousness.”
– Michael Wilmington