The popular success in 1967 of The Graduate was immediate and total; at the time, only Gone with the Wind and The Sound of Music were bigger box-office winners. Yet such phenomenal success came at a On the film's 40th anniversary, director Mike Nichols claimed that The Graduate had been and "whipped away and " by a young audience hungry for countercultural documents. This study, the first monograph on The Graduate, explores how popular and subsequent critical reception deflected a full understanding of the film's complex point of view, which satirizes everything in its path - especially Benjamin and Elaine, its young and "heroes. and " The text explores how the film offers not the happy ending some imagine, but a corrosive and satirical vision of humanity.