The Graduate (1967), directed by Mike Nichols
Barefoot in the Park (1967), directed by Gene Saks
Maroc 7 (1967), directed by Gerry O’Hara
In “The Graduate,” a 21-year-old who has just graduated from college is seduced into an affair with a neighbor woman twice his age. In “Barefoot in the Park,” made the same year, a newlywed couple must figure out how to integrate their vastly different temperaments.
While both films are set in an intensely 1960s bourgeois atmosphere, what distinguishes them are the contemporary elements included in “The Graduate” by Mike Nichols and ignored by “Barefoot” writer Neil Simon and director Gene Saks (whose first film this was). Nowhere is this contrast more evident than in the music soundtrack for each picture. “Barefoot” is accompanied by the most square music you can imagine, starting with its title theme by Neal Hefti. (Listen to at least the first minute of that. Yes, that was what Hollywood thought would be appropriate for a movie about youthful fun in 1967.) Contrast that with the music of Simon and Garfunkel in “The Graduate,” which is probably one of the aspects that made the movie a hit — along with its depiction of middle class malaise and youthful ambivalence toward assuming the role of an adult, themes that captured the zeitgeist. And even “Maroc 7” — about which, more in a minute — with its up-to-date fashions and its Bond-movie ripoffs, represents the mid-1960s better than “Barefoot.”
I can’t watch “The Graduate,” in which Benjamin, a recent college graduate, is preyed upon by a woman his mother’s age and spends an otherwise aimless post-grad summer fucking her, without thinking of the relative ages of the characters and the actors who portray them.
Many have called attention to this aspect before, but it’s quite striking: Dustin Hoffman, who plays 21-year-old Benjamin, was 30 when he made this picture. Anne Bancroft, who plays Mrs. Robinson — a middle-aged woman of, say, 45 — was 38. What is portrayed as at least a twenty year difference in the characters’ ages was really only a difference of eight.
Of course, movies and TV do this all the time. Actors in their mid- and even late 20s portray high schoolers; women in their mid-30s portray their parents. That’s the movie business.
But the question of the character’s ages and the actors’ ages it made me wonder if there was an actress who was 45 years old in 1967 who could have played Mrs. Robinson. As it turns out, there were lots of actresses born in 1922 who could have filled the bill: Ava Gardner (who turned down the role), Yvonne De Carlo, Doris Day (her manager-husband wouldn’t even look at the script; he considered it “trash”), and Cyd Charise. All had the sexy figure, and the legs, required by the role.1
I watched the film Cyd Charise made that same year. “Maroc 7” is a by-the-numbers action movie starring Gene Barry as a cop investigating a criminal ring run by Charise’s character. She plays the head of a modeling agency who uses the travel to international destinations as a cover for jewel smuggling. Barry, primarily a television actor, tries to cut a dashing figure a la Sean Connery, but mostly appears sweaty and grimacing. And Cyd Charise, though she exudes sex appeal throughout the picture, reveals limited acting chops. “Maroc 7” is strictly a B-movie, one of those they used to show in the wee hours and the only reason you watch it is that you’re too stoned to change the channel.
Since we're keeping score, Katharine Ross is also much older than the 19 or 20-year-old that she plays in the movie: she was 27 in 1967.
Now, according to an article in Vanity Fair about the making of “The Graduate,”2 the first actor who was up for Dustin Hoffman’s part was Robert Redford. And in fact, the character as written is a WASP, not a Jew as Dustin Hoffman is.
But according to legend, when Mike Nichols went to talk to Robert Redford about the part — which he badly wanted, by the way — Nichols asked him whether or not he knew what it was like “to strike out with a girl. And Redford replied, “What do you mean?” Nichols knew that an actor who had never been turned down by a girl could never play Benjamin Braddock. (What most people leave out is that Nichols himself directed Redford in the Broadway version of “Barefoot in the Park.” The Neil Simon play opened on Broadway in 1963 and was a huge hit.)
So what did Robert Redford do instead of appearing in “The Graduate”? He made the film adaptation of “Barefoot in the Park” with Jane Fonda.
“Barefoot” probably never worked well as a film, despite the enthusiastic performances by Redford and Fonda. But to begin to understand why a Neil Simon play that was exclusively about New York themes would be adapted for a film that the rest of the country might be expected to enjoy, you have to remember that in the mid-1960s, American popular culture was still very much a New York product. Musicals and other plays that began on Broadway were frequently adapted into films. In addition, until the late 1960s much of what appeared on television was still produced in New York. These depended upon the audience’s familiarity with the life and culture of New York City, and each of them in turn reinforced tropes about the city: busy, efficient corporations headquartered in skyscrapers and the swarming mass of humanity that commutes to them on the subway and, for the upper middle class, on trains to the suburbs; close-quarter living in multi-story apartment buildings with fire escapes; a nightlife scene that included fancy nightclubs with names like Copacabana, the Stork Club, and 21, where orchestras backed singers; the presence of odd people like artists, beatniks, vegetarians, and homosexuals, who unless it was a biopic about an artist or musician were always seen from the perspective of WASPS; the presence of ethnic people like Italians, Jews, Irish policemen, and ill-defined Europeans.3
Simon wrote hit after hit play capturing these tropes, including “The Odd Couple,” “Plaza Suite,” “The Goodbye Girl,” and “Barefoot in the Park.” “Barefoot” is about a newly married couple, Paul and Corie. He’s a conventional white guy who already works as a lawyer. Judging by her mother Ethel, played by Mildred Natwick, Corie’s family are also middle-class WASPs, but somehow Corie is different: She is essentially a manic pixie dream girl and an extrovert. The primary plot of the movie is whether Corie and Paul will be able to reconcile their distinct temperaments; the B plot is her mother allowing a neighbor, Mr. Velasco (Charles Boyer) — one of the ill-defined continental types I mentioned earlier — to sweep her off her feet.
Maybe the most generous thing we can say about “Barefoot in the Park” is that Neil Simon does seem to be aware that women’s attitudes toward the married life they were expected to aspire to and fulfill were changing. He represents this in Corie’s relentlessly optimistic and extroverted personality, not to mention an unquenchable enthusiasm for sex. Otherwise, the movie makes absolutely no concessions to the world of 1966 or 1967 in which it was filmed. Even Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, himself very much a stuffed shirt, called the movie “old-fashioned.”4
Saks went on to helm “The Odd Couple” (1968), another Neil Simon adaptation, and then direct “Cactus Flower” (1969), in which the main female character is yet another M.P.D.G., played by Goldie Hawn.
There’s a lot more that could be said about “The Graduate” and its story about recent college grad Benjamin being preyed upon by a woman twice his age. The creepiness of this is more noticeable today than when the movie was released, because we have vocabulary for it, words like “predation”and “trauma.” But those are our 21st century concerns, not those of the year 1967, when Hollywood was just beginning to find ways to connect with the kids, and when those kids, offered the choice between the utterly square vision of Neil Simon and the more sensitive and hip perspective of Mike Nichols, chose the latter.
In addition, a number of other stars were born in 1922: July Garland, Bea Arthur, Betty White, Barbara Hale, Doris Day — her manager-husband thought the “Graduate” script was “trash” and wouldn’t even give it to her — Barbara Bel Geddes, Veronica Lake, and Lisabeth Scott.
Consider these classic works: “12 Angry Men;” “The Honeymooners;” “I Love Lucy;” “West Side Story;” “Rear Window;” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s;” “The Odd Couple;” “On the Waterfront;” “The Apartment;” “The Dick Van Dyke Show;” “Desk Set;” “Sweet Smell of Success.”
https://www.nytimes.com/1967/05/26/archives/the-screen-barefoot-in-the-parkcomedy-by-neil-simon-at-the-music.html
Does my heart good to see I Love Lucy included on a list of "classic works"!