50 years after 'The Graduate,' restless Benjamin Braddock still speaks to young men -- and women

"The Graduate" charmed most everyone when it arrived in theaters 50 years ago, topping the 1967 box office, winning Mike Nichols an Academy Award for best director, turning a little-known stage actor named Dustin Hoffman into a movie star and becoming an evergreen generational touchstone. But it didn't charm Pauline Kael, who, in her famous 1969 essay "Trash, Art and the Movies," wrote that the film "only wants to succeed and that's fundamentally what's the matter with it." And she ribbed the audiences who bought that vision, mainly because so many of them were willing to see themselves in the character of Benjamin Braddock -- a young man who "has nothing to communicate," Kael wrote, "which is just what makes him an acceptable movie hero for the large movie audience." Whether or not Benjamin has anything to communicate, many men did of course embrace him, starting with the novelist Charles Webb, who based his original 1963 book, "The Graduate," on his own personal experience (minus the whole Mrs. Robinson thing). Producer Lawrence Turman, who optioned the rights to the material, claimed a similar level of identification, as did Nichols and the movie's co-screenwriter Buck Henry.