Possibly the best comedy of all times.

Rating: 10/10 (11 August 2006)

This is possibly the best comedy of all times, up there with Dr. Strangelove, MASH, His Girl Friday, Being There, Shampoo and Tootsie. Maybe the plot is simple but certainly not trivial. A young man graduating but has no clue to the future. Who has at this time in life - except the parents? Only the next door girl has his interest. But then years have passed since they talked. Is this is guy movie or what!?! To me its a gender/bender movie, one of the few masterpieces. If a woman who sees this moves does't click to it she can go all the way to Hawaii and not back without me paying! If that's the case, this woman is without humor and the main blood vessels. The characters are made of flesh and blood, people are put in surreal circumstances, especially Dustin as the timid graduate, tortured by his every-demanding parents, Bancroft as the lonely neighbor in need of company, drinking her problems away, and Ross as her innocent, oh so beautiful daughter. But then the mother is so also. Dustin is so right for this part and you can't imagine anyone else playing it. Just try to image Robert Redford in this part, but he didn't qulify because director Nichols sensed that Redford was too much at ease with girls. Thinking about directors with sense! Nowadays it's the producer with the biggest budget who calls the shots - Jerry what? So is Ann Bancroft who has never been lovelier or more aggressive in an amusing way. I love this movie, every bit of it. It's not only terribly funny, it's also painfully funny. It's surreal. Mike Nichols is the director but I want to mention the main producer, Joseph E Levine, who was an outsider in Hollywood; it was made and distributed by AVCO - something you don't see anymore. Made by an independent producer. The Graduate was made in 1967, the box office in those days was 104 millons dollars and is number 18 on the all time list (boxofficemojo.com) - meaning the newest craze on the stupid box office list, Pirates II, for all its glory and money making sounds, is no 50. (Just for you knowledge, adjusted for ticket price inflation The Graduate stands at 547 millions dollars). Those were the times. You cannot leave this movie without listening to the soundtrack by Paul Simon, which happens to be made solely for this movie. It's the perfect soundtrack, each song fitting the scene. As I understand it the soundtrack was made for the movie as an LP, meaning whole, individual songs, not bits and pieces scattered all over the place. It's a great shame they don't make movies like this anymore. What are the studios afraid of? Good stories? Great material? Seeking only the maximum box office impact the first weekend? And they are surprised that more people are watching movies in the comfort of their homes with the newest equipment. I for one have a DVD system and am ever expanding my DVD collection. New movies don't interest me anymore. I long for good movies. As things are, most of them are in the past.