"Plastics!" seems to be many people's takeaway from the film. At the time, we were so wary of our parent's military-industrial complex expectations for us.

I saw it at the theater in '67, and everything about it was different/exciting, yet familiar too. Dustin Hoffman was a fresh face, there was the Simon and Garfunkel score, the shock of a college kid having an affair with his friend's Mom. Nichols had come from the "Nichols and May" comedy team, and really had his finger on the pulse of youth.

I was in high school, but the movie really hit home with the brother in college. The thing was, Ben & Elaine weren't Hippies of any sort, rather virtuous youth not buying into the heavy-handed, boozy, bourgeois, marriage-crumbling, chemical & nuclear inducing, Vietnam War-loving parental mode of the day.

Looking back, I feel a bit sorry for my parents’ generation, as they had it tough in WW II, did so much for us, were certainly not a Country Club monolith. I still can't figure out why Ben had an affair w Mrs. Robinson (or how daughter Elaine forgives him for that…some awkward Thanksgiving dinners to follow?), but I guess its key to the alienation engine of the film. In fact, the shots of Ben's alienation (and the "I so don't want to grow up to be these people") is the best part of the film. It captured a kind of hinge point in American history.

Hoffman was such a fresh-face male-ingenu (though perhaps 10 yrs older than Ben’s character). He was a touchstone of our generation, memorably appearing in “Midnight Cowboy”, “Little Big Man”, “Papillon”, “All the President’s Men”, “Kramer vs Kramer”, etc. I got a kick out of him in “Little Fockers”, where he lies down on pavement to block DeNiro’s RV while saying “this is how we did it in the 60s”…surely many of us recalled “The Graduate” at that moment…