The sixties meant change. Change in the bedroom, the boardroom, the
streetcorner and of course your local movie theatre. With the code breaking and independent
zeitgeist films breaking through into the mainstream and winning money and
Oscars, every genre was transformed.
There were outsider comedies, dramas….and, of course, romantic pictures.
This new generation of
lovers-to-be had about a million different points of view on love. The first reaction was cynicism; falling in
love was something squares did, a symptom of a bourgeois society, and the
antithesis of free love. Novels like The
Harrad Experiment demanded open relationships and free love, while other movies
– like the 1967 proto-slacker dramady The Graduate – mocked the idea of love,
peace and those old wedding bells as the solution to everything. This is a decade that had Dr. Zhivago, Easy
Rider and The Graduate all released within ten turbulent years; that’s a lot of
different ways to look at love.
Benjamin Braddock has just
graduated college, and he has absolutely no idea what he wants to do with the rest
of his life. At his graduation party he
is nearly seduced by his parent’s friend, Missus Robinson, only to fall into a
hopeless affair with her while dodging the footfalls of his future life. His parents, worried about his aimlessness,
fix him up with Missus Robinson’s daughter, but Benjamin’s attraction to Elaine
soon turns into obsession and his entanglement with Missus Robinson only
results in calamitous jealousy.
In “The Graduate”, marriage is a
symptom of the bourgeois system. For
Missus Robinson it’s something she fell into just to please her social group;
she lives a duel life, the other in which she’s a free and easy as she wants to
be with her affection. Benjamin has
played by the rules his entire life; but with the promise of a steady future
looming on the horizon he suddenly becomes reactive, rejecting the world o his
parents alongside Elaine. But when the
twosome run away together the notion of happily ever together still chills
them.
Romance in film took a similarly
cynical view for quite awhile afterward, the big watershed turn in the public
nomenclature occurring when Love Story was released in 1970.
The plotline could not be simpler;
the storyline could not be more clichéd.
He’s an Ivy League Prepster; she’s a working-class intellectual at
school on a scholarship. They fight over
books in a library, which leads to a frolic in the snow, bonding over hockey,
and True Love. Their parents worry she’s
marrying him for his money; they rebel and marry anyway. Jenny and Oliver initially seem to have it
all – until their attempt at having children ends in infertility, and further
exploration results in the discovery of Jenny’s advanced cancer. As she dies they have to come to grips with
the briefness of their time together.
It
couldn’t be more clichéd, and yet this movie made millions at the box
office, launching Ali McGraw’s career and becoming a cultural touchstone. When Erich
Segal tried to write a sequel about Oliver’s life critics and audiences
rejected it, refusing to picture him and his life without Jenny. It’s success proved that even when popular
sentiment suggests weepy, corny romance isn’t cool sentiment will never go out
of style.
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