The Graduate / Point Blank

The Graduate

Friday, June 19 | 7:30 P.M.

Director Mike Nichols followed up his debut feature, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with this immensely popular and influential Generation Gap romantic comedy that earned Nichols a Best Directing Oscar. Dustin Hoffman, in a star-making performance, plays Benjamin Braddock, an unsettled college graduate who keeps busy in the arms of the classic “older woman,” Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Robinson, until falling helplessly for her daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross). Nichols and veteran cinematographer Robert Surtees (Ben-Hur, The Bad and the Beautiful) made droll use of the Panavision frame, aided by Simon and Garfunkel’s evocative songs.

1967, 106 minutes, color, DCP | Directed by Mike Nichols; written by Calder Willingham, Buck Henry, based on the novel by Charles Webb; with Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Katharine Ross, William Daniels, Murray Hamilton, Elizabeth Wilson.

Point Blank

Friday, June 19 | 9:30 P.M.

Lee Marvin plays a remorseless thief on a bloody trail of vengeance in director John Boorman’s stylish, kaleidoscopic thriller. Crime novelist Donald E. Westlake (using the pseudonym Richard Stark) wrote 24 novels about an unstoppable criminal named Parker, who has been represented on the big screen by such diverse stars as Robert Duvall, Jim Brown, Mel Gibson, Jason Statham and Anna Karina. Boorman’s film of the first Parker novel teams Marvin with the coolly beautiful Angie Dickinson as he works his way up the organized crime food chain. Boorman used disorienting editing, Philip Lathrop’s Panavision cinematography of memorable Los Angeles and San Francisco locations (including the Sunset Strip and Alcatraz), and Johnny Mandel’s unnerving score to create a one-of-a-kind cinematic mindscape that has only increased its classic status more than four decades later.

1967, 92 minutes, color, 35mm | Directed by John Boorman; written by Alexander Jacobs, David Newhouse, Rafe Newhouse, based on the novel The Hunter by Richard Stark; with Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, Keenan Wynn, Carroll O’Connor, Lloyd Bochner, Michael Strong, John Vernon, Sharon Acker.

Cinema has endured for decades in the face of competing visual storytelling mediums. In connection with our event The New Audience: Moviegoing in the Connected World, discover how studios and filmmakers – long before tablets, smartphones and the Internet – responded as audiences began trading regular visits to the movies for the ease and affordability of the first small screen: television. In response, numerous widescreen cinematic formats were rolled out around the world and capitalized on the breathtaking width of the projected image, not to mention the heightened fidelity of stereophonic sound, to achieve effects far beyond the reach of TV sets. This Is Widescreen offers a colorful assortment of films that demonstrate how filmmakers found new means of engaging the flexibility of the cinema and the key larger-than-life film formats employed over a 15-year period in Hollywood – from the launch of Cinerama in 1952 and the subsequent widescreen boom that included CinemaScope, VistaVision, Todd-AO and others – plus highlights from the first wave of 'Scope filmmaking from around the globe.