Word: robinsons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...other difficulty, says Matthew Robinson, a Negro and producer-host of Opportunity Line on Philadelphia's WCAU-TV, is to break through the ghetto dweller's "apprehension or reticence" about visiting an employment office. Even so, about half of the viewers who phone WCAU-TV for information on Saturday go to the employment office the next week. And why not? About half of them get work, and many others wind up in training programs or counseling that eventually makes them employable...
...lighting effects, and inadvertantly showing us less of Benjamin's emotions than we would see were the camera ten feet further away (a similar scene is done to perfection in Truffaut's Soft Skin); a scene shot through a diving mask and one with six frame inserts of Mrs. Robinson's naked body are obtrusively self-conscious, since nothing in previous scenes has prepared us for such technical gimmickry in isolated scenes...
...abandons his premise by destroying the character of Elaine, reducing her to mere plot function. Elaine rejects Benjamin when her mother describes him as a calculating rapist, then promptly changes her mind when Benjamin denies the charges. Seriously questioning neither version of the affair (and our knowledge of Mrs. Robinson makes hard to imagine Elaine believing her mother in the first place), Elaine's amazing malleability and flirtatious indecision toward Benjamin when he arrives at Berkeley remain almost entirely unmotivated. At the same time, her behavior becomse increasingly important, as the action of the film hinges directly on her reactions...
Equally inconsistent, Nicholas goes to pains to humanize Mrs. Robinson in the single-take hotel scene where Benjamin insists on talk before sex, then allows her to become a stock villainess who appears in the last hour for five minutes to serve an archetypal function as Dracula's daughter. Sensing the glaring omission of Bancroft, Nichols instructs Simon and Garfunkle to put her name in a song insert, a gratuitous gesture matched only by her one-line appearance at the wedding finale...
...many blankfaced ambiguous close-ups. Katherine Ross's perfect pre-Raphaelite beauty overshadows her valiant attempt to create something from nothing, an attempt which almost succeeds (as if it matters whether anyone so gorgeous can act). The Graduate's best performance comes from Murray Hamilton as cuckolded Mr. Robinson, an all-too-tangential figure in the proceedings...