Great movies remain themselves over the generations; they retain a serene sense of their own identity. Lesser movies are captives of their time. They get dated and lose their original focus and power. ``The Graduate'' is a lesser movie. It comes out of a specific time in the late 1960s when parents stood for stodgy middle-class values, and ``the kids'' were joyous rebels at the cutting edge of the sexual and political revolutions. Benjamin Braddock (…showed first 75 words of 632 total…

…showed last 75 words of 632 total…stars out of delight for the material it contains; to watch it today is like opening a time capsule. To know that the movie once spoke strongly to a generation is to understand how deep the generation gap ran during that extraordinary time in the late 1960s. There were true rebels in movies of the period , but Benjamin Braddock was not one of them. I wonder how long it took him to get into plastics.