Last week I screened Mike Nichols’ 1967 film “The Graduate” for my LifeQuest of Arkansas class. It’s one of those movies you probably know even if you haven’t seen it; about sex and love and the differences between those human requisites. It’s about a young man who graduates from a prestigious (presumably Ivy League) college, then returns to his parents’ house in Pasadena, Calif., to drift through the summer aimlessly, conducting a desultory affair with an older woman and later becoming obsessed with her daughter.

There’s a scene where one of his parents’ friends pulls him aside at his welcome-home party and tells him he wants to give him one word of advice: “Plastics.”

There’s the cringe-worthy scene where he asks, “Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?”

And there the’s soundtrack by Paul Simon, with songs performed by Simon & Garfunkel, including the monster hit “Mrs. Robinson.” (The finished version of that song doesn’t appear in the movie; all we hear are snippets of early drafts with alternate lyrics.)

Aside from a quick screening a week or two ago, mainly to ensure the used DVD I’d obtained would be usable, I hadn’t seen the film since the ’70s. It was, as it always is, a completely different film from the one I remembered.

To begin with, if you’d have asked me a couple of years ago how old the character Mrs. Robinson was in the movie, I’d have said she was probably in her 50s. In fact, Anne Bancroft was 35 when she played the role, and her character was only slightly older than her actual age. (Mrs. Robinson became pregnant with her daughter Elaine—who is 19 in the time period covered by the film—when she was in college. So she’s in her late 30s or early 40s.)

Bancroft was less than six years older than Dustin Hoffman, whose character Benjamin Braddock turns 21 in the movie, and only eight years older than Katharine Ross, who played Elaine. Gene Hackman was initially cast as Mr. Robinson—he was 36 at the time—but was fired three weeks into shooting, possibly because Nichols decided he was “too young” for the part. (In the 1990s, I asked Hackman about this; he said he was never given a reason as to why he was dismissed from the film and was still unhappy about it.)

Murray Hamilton, seven years older than Hackman, was brought in as a replacement. William Daniels, the actor who did play Ben’s father in the film, was 40 at the time, so plausibly the father of a 21-year-old, though Ben would likely have been born before he entered law school. Elizabeth Wilson, who played Ben’s mother, was 46, probably about the same age as her character.

Apparently Nichols’ friend Robert Redford—31 at the time—wanted desperately to play Ben, but lost out by answering “What do you mean?” when Nichols asked him if he’d ever struck out with a girl. Charles Grodin, 32 at the time, was also considered for the part of Ben— Grodin contended he was always Nichols’ first choice for the part—but he balked at the money offered. (Grodin said the film’s producers eventually met his demands, but insisted he audition for the part on short notice. He always said if he’d have had three days to prepare for the role he’d have gotten it.)

Watching “The Graduate” in 2024 is an interesting experience. Aside from being aware of the compressed ages of the actors involved, Ben Braddock comes off more as a creepy stalker with rage issues than a disaffected ex-high achiever coming to grips with the ultimate emptiness of adult life, the movie is still satisfying, though for different reasons. At the end of the film, when (spoiler alert) Ben interrupts Elaine’s wedding to sweep her away from the altar and onto a Santa Barbara city bus, the faces of the newly escaped couple slowly slide from ecstasy to a dawning dread. It anticipates the end of Michael Ritchie’s 1972 film “The Candidate,” where Robert Redford’s callow newly-elected senator asks his political consultant, “What do we do now?”

(The week before screening “The Graduate,” I’d screened Sam Peckinpah’s 1972 film “The Getaway,” hoping that we could tease out some resonances between the two films, especially in regard to their endings. You could look at “The Graduate” as a “transgressive couple” film, situating it in a mini-genre that would also contain “The Getaway,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Harold and Maude,” “Natural Born Killers” and Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” among many others.)

I guess, in 1967, audiences were supposed to be scandalized by the affair between Ben and Mrs. Robinson, though looking at it today I find it hard not to think of those characters as the actors who portray them. I see Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman, not Mrs. Robinson and Ben Braddock. I conflate the Katharine Ross of “The Graduate” with her later roles in “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (both starred Redford, who missed out on being Ben).

It seems amazing to think that Robert Surtees, whose acrobatic cinematography defied cinematic conventions of the time and gave the film a startling, almost post-modern look, shot his first big-budget motion picture in 1927. He worked on Paul Leni’s expressionistic adaptation of Victor Hugo’s “The Man Who Laughs,” one of the earliest sound pictures.

The films shadows get darker; it seems much closer to film noir these days than comedy.

Most of the cast of “The Graduate” had not been born when “The Man Who Laughs” premiered, but we are even further away from the premiere of “The Graduate” than they were from the advent of talkies.

I do not feel much different than I did when I was Ben Braddock’s age.

I am less certain about some things, there is in my joints a constant background hum of minor to negligible pain that I can usually (but not always) ignore, but I do not remember a time when I felt more vigorous or curious about the world. The only way I can tell that I am getting older is that I can reach deeper and deeper into the past. I remember the JFK assassination, the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. I remember “The Graduate.”

But it is a different movie than it was in 1967, than in was in the early ’70s when I first saw it. It will be different when I see it again. I stay the same: Mrs. Robinson gets younger and younger.