Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? showed that Director Mike Nichols, in his Hollywood debut, could make a film that was a succes d'estime, de scandale and de box office. The Graduate, his second screen effort, unfortunately shows his success depleted.
A brilliant young college graduate with a degree of innocence (Dustin Hoffman) returns to his parents' home in Los Angeles. There he is assaulted by fatuous friends of the family who entice him with offers. Most are commercial: "I have only one word for you," burbles a Babbittical businessman, "plastics." But one offer is sexual. Mrs. Robin son (Anne Bancroft), the neurotic wife of his father's business partner, lures
Benjamin to her bedroom and does a sinuous strip. "I think you're the most attractive of all my parents' friends," he says, heading for home and mother.
At their next meeting, however, he takes her to a hotel and begins the affair in earnest. As the summer drifts on, Benjamin's parents begin to worry about his listless manner. They arrange a date with an old school chum (Katharine Ross) who has but one fault: she is Mrs. Robinson's daughter. Benjamin confesses all, the girl runs back to campus, and her mother arranges a marriage of inconvenience in order to keep the couple apart. In the final reel, Benjamin revs up his psyche and his Alfa Romeo and heads for Santa Barbara to break up the wedding.
Most of the film has an alarmingly derivative style, and much of it is secondhand. The screwball scene in which Benjamin breaks up the wedding is uncomfortably close to Morgan. The editing features tricky sound overlaps from one scene to another and quick jump cuts from faces to bodies and back again, yet never consistently settles on a style. There is even a disappointing touch of TV situation comedy. A domestic argument ends with the toast popping out of the toaster, a visit to the zoo features the inevitable cute chimp mugging in its cage.
In the title role, Hoffman is an original, likable actor whose bag of monumeital insecurities marks the truly assured comedian. As the vamp, Anne Bancroft is appropriately sly and predatory, and Katharine Ross, as her daughter, possesses one of the freshest new faces in Hollywood. But the screenplay, which begins as genuine comedy, soon degenerates into spurious melodrama. Moreover, Director Nichols, perhaps affected by his stage experience, has given much of the film the closed-in air of a studio set. Like Nichols himself, The Graduate appears to be a victim of the sophomore jinx.