Criterion’s Bluray of Mike Nichols‘ The Graduate popped yesterday. I’ve seen it a thousand times and I already own the MGM Bluray that came out in 2011, but I bought the damn Criterion anyway because of the Howard Suber commentary track, which is one of the best I’ve ever heard on any Bluray or DVD of any film. Seriously — it’s really worth watching this film with Suber on the couch, chatting away. Just do it and you’ll thank me.
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Taken today at northwest corner of Sunset and Cahuenga, just after buying the Criterion Graduate Bluray at Amoeba across the street.
“Yes, Suber’s commentary is an academic analysis, a bit dry and professorial, a formal instruction,” I wrote two or three years ago, “but it’s very wise and knowledgable, and ripe with all kinds of allusions, insights, asides and connections. Suber gently explains how there’s a lot more to this 1967 classic than just story, dialogue and performances. It’s really quite the integrated audio-visual tour de force.”
From Frank Rich’s essay in the Criterion liner notes: “The major studios all turned down The Graduate. The film was financed instead by an independent producer, Joseph Levine, who grew impatient as the shooting ran over schedule, into a fourth month. Levine exhibited scant optimism about the movie’s prospects, and some of the most influential critics, including Pauline Kael and John Simon, dismissed it, as later would a writer at the New Yorker, Jacob Brackman, whose screed went on for some twenty pages.