AnneBancroft Tagged Articles at Cinematical

When Cinematical staff first discussed the "Montages We Love" series, the image that popped into my head was a classic: the from-bed-to-pool montage in the 1967 film The Graduate. This is my favorite part of the Mike Nichols-directed movie -- yes, even better than the "plastics" line and the bit with Buck Henry and that iconic scene at the end.

The montage is a triumph of clever editing, thanks to Nichols and editor Sam O'Steen, whose other credits include Cool Hand Luke, Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown. It begins with Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) lazing in his parents' swimming pool, then as he leaves the pool and pulls on a shirt, he's revealed to be in a hotel room with Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft). Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence" and then "April, Come She Will" play in the background as Ben shifts from his bed to the pool to the hotel, drinking beer and looking passive and bored, or with his expression masked by sunglasses. The scene ends with Ben pushing himself off the pool's raft -- and into Mrs. Robinson's arms on the hotel bed.

Why do so many women get stuck playing characters older than they are? While watching Duplicity, for example, I was thinking, "Wow, Julia Roberts really looks her age." (She's 41.) I don't mean that in a negative way -- she's still a fine-looking woman -- but it's rare to see an actress in her 40s or 50s playing a character who's in her 40s or 50s.

More often than that, we see younger women playing older characters, as Hadley Freeman points out in The Guardian: "It is all too easy for a female actor to find herself cast as the mother of someone who once played her boyfriend as soon as she blows out the candles on her 35th birthday cake." She cites various examples:

• Sally Field as Tom Hanks' mother in Forrest Gump. Age difference: ten years.
• Glenn Close as Mel Gibson's mother in Hamlet. Age difference: nine years.
• Anne Bancroft as Dustin Hoffman's matronly seductress in The Graduate. Age difference: five years.
• Elizabeth Taylor as Dennis Hopper's mother in Giant. Age difference: four years.
• Angelina Jolie as Colin Farrell's mother in Alexander. Age difference: one year.
• Lea Thompson as Michael J. Fox's mother in Back to the Future. Age difference: none.

Freeman concludes: "Quite why film directors are so averse to having middle-aged roles played by middle-aged women comes down to male insecurity and misogyny ... The sense of disgust of older women is so deeply entrenched in Hollywood that even when the role is specifically for an older woman, no one wants to see an actual older woman on screen." All of the directors of the films cited above are men.

Do you want to see more "actual older women" on screen? Or would you prefer that older female characters be played by younger actresses?

The story behind the making of Delgo is heartwarming and inspiring. Fathom Studios, based in Atlanta, Georgia, has been creating commercial computer animation for more than ten years. When they decided to produce their own feature-length narrative film, they did it completely independent of the Hollywood studio system. They labored long and hard with a much smaller budget and a much smaller staff than the animation behemoths. They bravely posted "digital dailes" throughout production, a kind of progressive, online series of "making of" snippets. They recruited a slew of actors with name recognition -- Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt, Val Kilmer, Malcolm McDowell, Louis Gossett Jr., Michael Clarke Duncan, Burt Reynolds, Chris Kattan, and the late Anne Bancroft in her last performance -- to voice the characters.

If only the film as a whole was as dramatic and lively as the behind-the-scenes story. Under the direction of Marc F. Adler and Jason Maurer, the 3-D animation is quite lovely to behold, but the characters are one-dimensional and the script, credited to six writers, spends too much time on convoluted plot mechanics. Delgo falls into an uncomfortable place where the technical achievement can be admired without the emotions ever being engaged, provoking nothing more than a tepid response ("meh") when the end credits begin to roll.

Set in a lush fantasy world of flying creatures, colorful reptiles, and the odd monster, beast, and giant insect, Delgo pits two races against one another. The proud, dominant, invading race lords it over the humble, subjugated, native race. Sound familiar?

There's nothing like an eviction notice to make a man resort to desperate measures. Charles Webb, author of the original novel that was made into The Graduate, was facing homelessness when he decided to sell his unfinished sequel to Random House, which plans to publish the novel next year. The book will revisit Ben Braddock and his now-wife Elaine ten years later, as they home school their two children in upstate New York. The sequel is appropriately titled Home School (unless Random House changes it to simply The Graduate II -- I wouldn't be surprised), and Mrs. Robinson is somehow featured in its story. Webb isn't sure whether or not a movie will be made since he doesn't know how the rights will be handled. Originally, he didn't receive a dime for the rights to The Graduate. His last novel, New Cardiff, was adapted into the film Hope Springs.

Obviously if there is a film, the cast of the original would not return (although it would be interesting to have Katherine Ross return as her character's mother), and the Mike Nichols film is such a classic that anybody cast in the iconic roles will spark controversy and protest. Then there's the matter of the soundtrack. Okay, that is easy -- a number of artists today are going for that Simon and Garfunkel sound. See the Garden State soundtrack for evidence. The thing I'm most worried about is that now we may get a sequel to Rumor Has It to explain its character's connection to Webb's follow-up.

• Robert Berkvist on Anne Bancroft: "Graced with a sultry voice and expressive mouth, Ms. Bancroft could appear both tough and vulnerable, and she eagerly sought out nearly every kind of role, maturing effortlessly over the decades."
• Glenn Collins visits Steiner Studios, the new filmmaking complex on the Brooklyn banks of the East River. He quotes Bancroft's widower, Mel Brooks, on why it makes sense to shoot there: "Without the tax benefits, the horrible truth is, this movie would probably be made in Kabul, or you know, wherever it's the cheapest place in the world for us to shoot."
• "The challenge in creating loser-heroes is to keep viewers emotionally invested, and to make the characters' cringe-inducing failures palatable". Caryn James examines another specious trend.
• Stephen Holden reviews Paternal Instinct, a documentary about two gay men, a surrogate and a baby.
• Two men were arrested over the weekend for trying to sell a copy of the new Harry Potter book to a journalist for $90,000. (What? It might as well be a screenplay.)

I don't want to write an obituary for Anne Bancroft. I could go and  say a couple of things about her life and her filmography, but that would seem a little disingenous to me. Because really, I'm the kind of fan that Bancroft would have hated - I love her first, foremost, and virtually only, because of The Graduate (although The Turning Point is good, too).

It was one of those movies that just seemed to be on all the time when I was growing up, and as a result, I think I internalized a lot of its imagery without really understanding any of its meaning. By the time I was an 18-year-old freshman in film school and sitting through Mike Nichol's film cut-by-cut in a lecture, the damage had already been done - Mrs. Robinson had already managed to influence me. Not that I'm a cradle-robbing alcoholic (at least, not yet),  but certainly, style-wise, my entire fashion aesthetic seems almost unconciously modelled after Anne Bancroft in that film. The leopard print, the sunglasses, the big brown hair with the golden highlight at the crown. I remember as a kid just thinking that her look was the coolest, and I've never really gotten over it.

So I went online and I tried to find a photo gallery from the film, so that I could demonstrate what I'm on about here, but there isn't much. Instead, take a look at this page from NPR; they've got tons of audio features (including a report by Don Lee on the making of the film and interviews with Buck Henry, Mike Nichols and Dustin Hoffman) and a video clip from the film, of Benjamin's first encounter with Mrs. Robinson. The New York Times has more, including movie trailers and a short, career-spanning slide show.