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SEDUCED BY MRS. ROBINSON

Name: SEDUCED BY MRS. ROBINSON
Author: Beverly Gray
ISBN: 978-1-61620-616-1

HOW THE GRADUATE BECAME THE TOUCHSTONE OF A GENERATION

by Beverly Gray ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 7, 2017

The book is not without flaws, but Gray effectively shows how The Graduate, despite ignoring the flashpoint issues of the...

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A Hollywood industry insider unspools an absorbing, sometimes-uneven analysis of a film classic on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.

At its best, Gray's (Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Biography of the Godfather of Indie Filmmaking, 2000) book is a well-researched and skillfully composed echo of such Hollywood tomes as Aljean Harmetz's Round Up the Usual Suspects. Only now does The Graduate (1967) reveal itself, in one sense, as a film that was out of place and time in its own era. As Gray points out, it is a movie that has always meant different things to different people, “a cinematic Rorschach test.” Though it has its detractors, not least for a somewhat abrupt segue from social satire to romantic comedy, this seminal, deceptively sophisticated film has shown great staying power, and its innovative approach to collaboration, casting, and cinematic invention was, and remains, influential—as was its ambiguous climax, the significance of which Gray captures exceptionally well. She reveals a film viewed as an outsider's effort in more ways than one: outside a studio system whose demise it helped accelerate and outside the dominant American cultural milieu. The author, who leads screenwriting workshops at UCLA, has a practiced interpretive mind. She demonstrates how, for all its popularity and game-changing success, the toughest critics were split on the film's value and how many in the youth movement rebutted rather than embraced the movie's relevance. It is in these passages, and in offering an alternative, not-so-sympathetic take on the movie's protagonist, that Gray is most penetrating. But one wonders if a scene-by-scene synopsis and scrutiny is really necessary. Interesting in the main, it can get tedious. The author also engages in some questionable, rather high-blown assaying of the filmmakers' intents and weakens her remembrance of the ’60s with a glib introduction.

The book is not without flaws, but Gray effectively shows how The Graduate, despite ignoring the flashpoint issues of the day, worked as a subversive force in a period about to reassess its cinematic and cultural conventions.

Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-61620-616-1

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Algonquin

Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ART & PHOTOGRAPHY | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

- PROFILES
Beverly Gray

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

by Maya Angelou ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1969

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

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Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynchingâ€”and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.