A New Blu-ray Celebrates ‘Goodbye, Columbus’ as the Bridge Between ‘The Graduate’ and ‘Love Story’

The 1969 adaptation of Philip Roth's debut novella was a hit upon release before slowly drifting into obscurity. A new physical media release provides an opportunity for rediscovery and reappraisal.

When Paramount released “Goodbye, Columbus” in the spring of 1969, the movie was a smash hit, earning more than 10 times its budget and becoming one of the year’s highest-grossing films. It also scored an Oscar nomination for Arnold Schulman’s screenplay, which the writer adapted from Philip Roth’s National Book Award-winning novel. Yet unlike other 1969 touchstones like “Midnight Cowboy,” “Easy Rider,” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Goodbye, Columbus” drifted into obscurity in the decades that followed, which makes its new physical media release from Fun City Editions a cause for celebration.

Fun City’s Blu-ray was taken from a new 4K master scanned from the film‘s original negative, and it offers an opportunity to discover or reappraise “Goodbye, Columbus” in a form far more faithful to cinematographer Gerald Hirschfield’s original intentions than the sludgy DVD and streaming transfers that have plagued the movie in recent years. Hirschfield was also the director of photography on classics like “Fail Safe,” “Young Frankenstein,” and “Coma,” and while “Goodbye, Columbus” doesn’t achieve the perfection of those films, it’s nevertheless a key movie of the New Hollywood that ought to be better known and more widely discussed.

In 1969, Schulman, director Larry Peerce, and the rest of the team behind “Goodbye, Columbus” benefited from serendipitous timing that made their film exactly what the moviegoing public was looking for. Roth’s novella about the summer romance between working-class Newark librarian Neil Klugman and nouveau riche Short Hills Radcliffe student Brenda Patimkin was justly lauded when it came out in 1959, but it didn’t make Roth a household name. That would happen a few months before Peerce’s movie came out, when “Portnoy’s Complaint” was published and made Roth a literary superstar.

Roth’s sexually explicit confessional by “a lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish bachelor” was a massive bestseller, which was good news for the makers of “Goodbye, Columbus” but a mixed blessing for Roth, who had always placed himself in opposition to what he saw as the dumbing-down of American culture. That dumbing-down, in his eyes, was represented by things like the bestseller list and Hollywood movies like the one based on his first book, which was about to hit theaters as “Portnoy” exploded across the country. Though Roth would later say “Goodbye, Columbus” was the best movie made from one of his books, this was faint praise given both the generally abysmal quality of Roth adaptations and his own low regard for cinema as an art form.

Although Roth worked as a film critic for The New Republic for about a year just before “Goodbye, Columbus” was published, he was never any kind of cinephile, and he never bought into the auteur theory that placed filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks on the same artistic plane as great novelists and painters. (In fact, according to Leo Robson’s New Yorker piece “Philip Roth Versus the Movies,” Roth only mentioned the name of the director once during his entire run as a reviewer.) He was happy to accept $25,000 from Hollywood to adapt his novella into a film, but his expectations for any artistic satisfaction were low.

Ironically, the very tension Roth felt between artistic integrity and selling out or dumbing down was a key theme of “Goodbye, Columbus” and one of the reasons audiences flocked to the movie in 1969. In the movie, Neil (Richard Benjamin in his feature film debut) opposes the competitive, consumerist values fervently practiced by Brenda’s family. The depiction of a young man pushing against conformity is reminiscent of Mike Nichols’ “The Graduate,” a smash hit in 1967 that likely paved the way for “Goodbye, Columbus” getting a green light from Paramount; its influence is certainly obvious, from the persistent water imagery to the device of having a popular music group compose songs for the movie.

Sadly, The Association’s tunes for “Goodbye, Columbus” are nowhere near as memorable as the Simon and Garfunkel compositions in “The Graduate,” one of several reasons why Peerce’s movie didn’t have the long-lasting cultural impact of Nichols’. Another reason is possibly that Neil is a bit too specific; Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin in “The Graduate” is a bit of a cipher, less fully realized on the page than Neil Klugman but for that reason more of an empty vessel for the audience to read into — it’s easier for subsequent generations of filmgoers to see themselves in Benjamin Braddock than Neil Klugman, because he’s whoever you want him to be. Klugman has more clearly defined beliefs and interests and prejudices — something that, oddly, works against the film’s ongoing mass appeal.

That “Goodbye, Columbus” was a mass appeal movie in its time speaks to both Roth’s popularity and Peerce’s then-fashionable sense of cinematic style — as was common in the late 1960s, he gets a lot of mileage out of the zoom lens (a bit too much by contemporary standards), and there are a lot of lyrical uses of slow motion and other techniques that place “Goodbye, Columbus” firmly in its era and make it feel like more of a hazy memory piece than Roth’s book (even though the book’s first-person narration should theoretically make it feel like more of a memory).

Viewed today, “Goodbye, Columbus” plays like a bridge between two far more well-known films: “The Graduate” and director Arthur Hiller and writer Erich Segal’s 1970 tearjerker “Love Story.” That film’s doomed female lead was played by Ali MacGraw, who became a star as Brenda in “Goodbye, Columbus,” and to a certain degree, “Love Story” is a gender-reversed repeat of the earlier film’s class dynamics. Peerce was originally attached to direct “Love Story” but ultimately bailed on the movie, calling it “dreck” and handing Hiller one of the biggest hits of the early 1970s. Ironically, when Peerce went on to direct his own tearjerker, “The Other Side of the Mountain,” a few years later, Universal marketed it with the tag line, “Not since ‘Love Story.'”

“Goodbye, Columbus” lacks the smoothly engineered manipulative tendencies of “Love Story” and the big laughs of “The Graduate,” but on its own modest terms it remains an involving piece of work, thanks largely to the superb performances by Benjamin and MacGraw as the young lovers and Schulman and Peerce’s ability to find, if not a visual corollary for Roth’s language, at least a satisfying substitute for it. Their sense of satire is broader and blunter than Roth’s, but their sensitivity toward their characters is, in some ways, more open and empathetic — a late scene between MacGraw and Jack Klugman as Brenda’s father that doesn’t exist in the novel is so beautiful and heartbreaking that even Roth had to admit it was good when he saw the film on its initial release.

The new Blu-ray of “Goodbye, Columbus” is essential viewing not just for the film itself, but for the excellent special features Fun City has curated to accompany the feature presentation. The best of these is an in-depth audio commentary by film historian Bill Ackerman, whose thorough exploration of the movie’s production is as engaging as it is informative. Further insights are provided by a new interview with composer Charles Fox, and a video of a fantastic 2016 panel discussion on the film featuring Benjamin, MacGraw, Peerce, Schulman, and others. Although Peerce hasn’t directed a feature film in over 30 years, he’s still with us — 95 years young! — and it’s great to see one of his best movies getting the kind of treatment it has always deserved.

“Goodbye, Columbus” is now available on Blu-ray from Fun City Editions.