Experiment: Watch The Graduate, Catch-22, and Carnal Knowledge in a Row

Mike Nichols was a real Golden Boy in the 60's. By the time he made his first movie -- Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf -- in 1966, he had already established himself as part of the iconic man/woman comedy team "Nichols and May"(on TV radio, and Broadway for hundred of performances) and as a successful stage director who helped put Neil Simon on the map with Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple.

Virginia Woolf was landmark about language(cussing) revealed Liz Taylor to be an acting match for her husband Richard Shakespeare Burton and put Nichols on course to be a "new major film director."

Which he proved AGAIN the next year with "The Graduate." It was then, and is now, rather a fake-out: a "countercultural movie" in which the counterculture isn't much seen or matters(no talk of Vietnam for instance, or draft resistance.)

No matter. The Graduate became something like the Third Highest Grossing movie of all time to that date and Mike Nichols could still do no wrong.

Until, three years later -- he made Catch-22 and finally got that failure that the envious were hoping for.

Catch-22 had been yet another "counterculture novel of the 60's" -- an impossible-to-film epic that required a filmmaker of Mike Nichols greatness to bring it to the screen. When the movie came out, Life Magazine ran a giant two page color photo with the huge cast assembled in various places -- but Mike Nichols was at the front of the photo, the biggest figure in the photo -- the true star of the movie. The auteur.

The movie failed with critics (for the most part) and at the box office. What killed it, some said (including Nichols) was the movie of MASH came out a few months earlier in the same movie year (1970) and was far faster, sexier, funnier and more alive than what Nichols created. With just as much blood and anti-war sentiment.

It only took a year for Nichols to save himself. With a much smaller movie -- only six speaking parts -- and some good ol' sexual controversy to get articles written(pro and con) and for big money to be earned. Carnal Knowledge led to a US Supreme Court case based on the film being banned and a theater owner being arrested for showing it. The film posited two horrible, sexist, misogynist, over-sexed men(Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel) and two sex object doormat women(Candice Bergen and Ann-Margret.) But it was a hit -- and Nichols had "saved his career." Until he made two more bombs in a row -- Day of the Dophin and The Fortune(with Nicholson and Beatty yet! Suicide to fail with those two stars.) Nichols went back to Broadway to nurse his wounds and wait about a decade to come back to movies.

Which is why these three Nichols films -- The Graduate, Catch-22, and Carnal Knowledge -- are pretty much a "trilogy of Nichols the auteur." "Film school" watch them back to back some time. I did. You will see(I think) that what was groundbreaking and worthy of the Best Director Oscar in 1967 in The Graduate -- became old-hat, affected, twee and too overtly arty -- in the two movies that followed it.

The "New York crowd" hangs heavy over all three films -- one senses a certain smugness and snobbishness borne of a crowd who hung together and made fun of everybody "outside." The Graduate is set in LA, but has a New York feel. Catch-22 is set in WWII Italy, but the cast looks like they are dropping by from Elaine's. Carnal Knowledge uses a Jules Pfeiffer script and a claustrophobic New York to set the style.

But mainly it is Mike Nichols STYLE that hangs heavy over the three films, back to back. People shown in huge close-ups dominating the screen while others are in the background. Stagy group shots. Arch and smug deadpan acting...or(suddenly) yelling overacting. These three films look the same and play the same and its at once interesting and deflating to see how quickly Nichols "got transparent."

When he came back to movies after his Broadway exile, Nichols seems to have left the Graduate/Catch-22/Carnal Knowledge style behind him. He either couldn't bring it back or didn't want to.

And so we have three near-identical films -- one blockbuster, one flop, one hit -- giving us a look at how a director rose and fell as a "60's/70's auteur."