Word: benjamin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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GOODBYE, COLUMBUS. Director Larry Peerce has produced some rare moments of social criticism in this film, but he frequently slips into burlesque. Nevertheless, Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw save the show with skillful performances...
...Consider Benjamin Braddock. Raised in the comfort of an upper-middle class California suburb, sent off to a good school, given all the appurtenances necessary for existence at such a place. (A picture of his college room leaps into mind so readily: KLH, chianti bottle with candle drippings, and all.) He comes home, realizes just what sort of a disgusting life his parents and their friends lead, and is in a quasi-cynical sort or existential agony about it all for several reels of film...
Meanwhile, of course, he continues to live in a manner that would be impossible if it weren't for his parents' sellout, hypocritical, establishment, plastic lives. At the risk of sounding like the Midwestern Methodist I am, every single action of Benjamin Braddock's is that of a spoiled rotten (albeit sensitive, self-deprecating, gentle, all the things you learn to value in a place like Harvard) brat. Not a brat in the old sense of the word, of course, not the overtly selfish sort who demands things and his own way, but the breed that seems to flourish particularly...
...really does growl at him -- on the phone, yet. Twelve years he's been married; twelve years of his live shot to hell. That's why Jack Lemmon is able to make Brubaker so much worthier an object of sympathy (or empathy, depending on your age group) than Benjamin. Braddock stumbles through situations picking up the emotional cost with a sort or moral charge plate...
Disfavor turned to harassment in 1965, when Mail Reporter Benjamin Pogrund wrote a series of articles exposing brutality and unhygienic living conditions in South Africa's jails. Gandar editorially demanded an inquiry. Instead, the government set up perjury trials for the ex-prisoners who had been interviewed. Four were convicted, and served sentences of up to 18 months. Then, Pogrund and Gandar were arrested under a law that makes it a crime to publish information about prisons without taking "reasonable steps" to verify accuracy...