“Aggressively entertaining”: the “sexy” movie that was revelatory for Ron Howard
A true master of the director’s chair, Ron Howard has proven his worth as one of the most significant filmmakers on the contemporary American cinema scene. Howard has always wanted to be a director and largely saw his early childhood acting career as the perfect way to get into the profession.
He was right because ever since making his first movies in the 1980s, Howard has grown in stature, delivering some of the most memorable efforts in modern film. The likes of A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13, and Cinderella Man have all come from the former Happy Days star.
Like any director worth their salt, though, Howard has a deep respect for the cinematic medium itself, and he has previously mentioned some of the movies that left the deepest impression on him on several occasions. The 1960s looks to have been a key era of cinema for Howard as he once spoke of the way Mike Nichols’ The Graduate served as his introduction to a new kind of filmmaking.
“It was at that moment both rebellious and hilarious, and the music was great,” Howard had said in an interview with CBS. “It looked and sounded and felt very, very different from everything else.” With Paul Simon writing the original songs for Nichols’ film, it’s no surprise that Howard was blown away by the sound of The Graduate.
The 1967 romantic comedy-drama is based on Charles Webb’s 1963 novel of the same name and tells of a young, aimless, recent college graduate played by Dustin Hoffman who is seduced by an older woman, only to soon fall for her daughter. Anne Bancroft and Katharine Ross play the mother and daughter, respectively.
“The Graduate was a full-on entertainment,” Howard noted. “I mean, it’s hilarious. I was 13. It was sexy.” The director went on to explain that when he first watched the film as a young teenager, he had had his sexual interest piqued and began to wonder, “Is there a Mrs. Robinson around out there for me?”
The film was undoubtedly “provocative” for Howard, and yet it retained its sheer “aggressively entertaining” quality, “avoiding any sort of existential snobbery at work”. Still, the movie was “smart” and “made points”. Nichols ended up winning the ‘Best Director’ Academy Award for the work, showing the true brilliance of his early work as a filmmaker.
Nichols’ film became so synonymous with the 1960s that Howard believes that it “captured the Zeitgeist”. He explained, “You know, that wasn’t looking back. That was capturing a moment, which is a hard thing to do with movies that take a long time to make.”
What impressed Howard the most about The Graduate was the way it seemed to deliver its smart messages without being too challenging. That relates to the way that Howard largely prefers to enjoy films. “Sometimes there’s something very comforting about a film unfolding more or less as you expect it to,” he said. “For me as an audience member, I want to have a fulfilling experience. I don’t want to be frustrated too much.”
Still, the “fresh” nature of The Graduate when it arrived in the late 1960s allowed Howard to “see the world a little differently”. The film left an impression on the director so that when he is making a film, he always considers giving a “satisfying, fulfilling audience experience, because that’s important to me, too.”
Check out the trailer for The Graduate below.
