The movie that blew Ron Howard’s mind: “I recognised it as something so effortlessly stylish”
By the time he’d even finished his teenage years Ron Howard was already a veteran of film and television, but his mind was still capable of being blown on the odd occasion a particularly eye-opening cinematic experience rolled around.
As the son of actors Jean Speegle Howard and Rance Howard, there was a high probability from the moment he was born that he’d follow in his parent’s footsteps, with the prophecy being fulfilled very early on when he made his screen debut as a nipper in a film that released shortly after he’d turned two years old.
By the time he was old enough to walk, Howard was already embarking on a career in the performing arts, so he was exposed to the inner workings of the industry a lot earlier than most. His mother and father may have been entertainers first and foremost and huge supporters of his career path from the beginning, but they wouldn’t let him see more provocative fare unsupervised.
Fortunately, his old man was kind enough to accompany him on regular trips to the cinema, where they’d see films that weren’t necessarily geared towards young Ron’s demographic. One such instance came in 1967 when he was left in a state of amazement and wonder at a picture that was equal parts playful, sexy, and thematically resonant for an entire generation of disaffected youths.
“It blew my mind when I saw that movie,” he said to Letterboxd of The Graduate. “I probably didn’t see it until I was 13. That’s pretty adult, but my dad wouldn’t mind. As long as he went with me, I could see more mature movies. I innately recognised it as something that was so effortlessly stylish. I kept going back to that movie over the next five, six years.”
Marrying style and substance, The Graduate further outlined Mike Nichols as one of the fastest-rising directors in Hollywood, with the filmmaker following up the ‘Best Director’ nod he accrued for debut feature Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by going one better and taking home the Academy Award for his sophomore film.
It was also the movie that turned Dustin Hoffman into a star, with Anne Bancroft and Katharine Ross rounding out a trio of performative nods in the ‘Best Actor’, ‘Best Actress’, and ‘Best Supporting Actress’ categories respectively. Even though he was too young to understand at the time, Benjamin Braddock was representative of how many postgraduates in 1960s suburban America collected their degrees only to discover they had no idea what they wanted to do next.
A coming-of-age story with the salacious twist of a torrid affair, The Graduate sparked Howard’s imagination like no movie had ever done before, and it was one he kept revisiting in the years to come.
