On Screen

...Sketchiness afflicts the whole long Berkeley section of the film...

...That is the trouble with our middlebrow culture and its artifacts: The notion of a corrective is to «o to the opposite extreme...

...Don Quixote and Lochin-var...

...There are familiar slow fade-ins on characters, overlaps of visuals from one scene with dialogue from the next, shifts in time and place bridged by the same, seemingly continuous movement, tricky camera placements, as inside a clothes closet...

...I have not read Charles Webb's novel and cannot say how many of the film's flaws are inherited from the book...

...Even here, however, it is inconsistent...

...And in the triumph of such a chimerical figure (I ion's courage, serpent's wisdom, goat's stupidity) over the hostile monolith of society...

...After Ben's father tells him his marriage plans seem half-baked, and Ben, with his typical cute stolidity, replies that they are fully baked, two pieces of toast pop up from a toaster...

...There again, though, what does it matter...

...The California wasps are shot through with little New York Jewish touches—as when Ben exclaims in amazement about the Robinsons' mating habits...

...And for supreme pretentiousness, we get a protracted shot of Ben crucified against the plate glass of the choir loft at Elaine's wedding...

...Ben bumbles through a large part of the film...

...Overelaboration runs through the entire film...

...We must crawl inside the rubber suit with Ben, breathe stertorously and galumph with him, dive into the swimming pool with him, watch through his visor, and later even from underwater, his family making asses of themselves...

...When the pilot's voice in the very first shot announces over the plane's p.a...

...Robinson, are pertinent, pungent, and not without poignancy...

...But must the pins be driven into the specimens with a hammer...

...Katharine Ross, thanks in large part to the scriptwriters, Calder Willingham and Buck Henry (the final script, we hear, is almost all Henry's), emerges as a pretty cipher...

...Nichols keeps reprising these decompositions, until the soundtrack resembles the streets of New York during the garbage collectors' strike...

...The Graduate, in fact, has some effective moments: Parts of Ben's seduction, and the entire scene in which Ben tries for precoital conversation with Mrs...

...system, "We are about to make our descent into Los Angeles," the film's only moment of subtlety has been used up...

...Robinson, Dad's partner's wife, the predatory dipsomaniac who seduces Ben, is represented as a sexy gargoyle with perhaps two seconds' worth of incipient humanity allowed her...

...The extreme close-up and telcphoto lenses tire hauled out for spurious reasons...

...William Daniels does much for the obvious part of Ben's father: the role of the mother is too thankless to give Elizabeth Wilson a sporting chance...

...Obviousness and pretentiousness appear either in a pure state or commingled...

...Ben still addresses her, even in bed it seems, as "Mrs...

...In a Berkeley frat house, every boy has to be as blond as the California sunshine...

...Robinson...

...And that car, Ben's red Alfa Romeo, a linear descendant of all those ubiquitous, scene-stealing cars in Godard's and Lelouch's films, is on screen more than any character save Ben...

...but does that make for a good film...

...The part of Mr...

...If the picture hangs crooked in one direction, those who set out to straighten it push it awry in the other...

...In the car you did it...

...Smith's answering service at a time of utmost physical and emotional strain—tax my credulity beyond endurance...

...Robinson, who carries on with Ben as she presumably has with many others, casually and out of boredom and frustration, nevertheless is so demonically possessive about him that she will go to satanic lengths to prevent him from a happy marriage with her daughter...

...The upright and sweet Elaine, for all her love of Ben, allows herself to be hustled off by her monstrous parents to marry another beau—an elaborate, formal wedding, by the way, which, we are to believe, was arranged for and celebrated in something like 36-48 hours...

...Robinson: Jesus loves you more than you can know"), and arc set to his and Garfunkel's music that is not so much rock as rock bottom...

...I myself am not so concerned with maintaining the unity of tone as I am with safeguarding a certain consistency of character...

...without perceptible resources or qualifications, though, and with familial ire pursuing them, it is an exiguous Eden they can look forward to...

...The stages of Ben's and Elaine's romance are much too elliptical to convince anyone not a raving swinger or abject square...

...There is a line where satire ends and oafish-ness begins, and The Graduate keeps crossing it as if it had diplomatic immunity...

...After carrying on a copious affair with Elaine's mother...

...I don't think the director, Mike Nichols, intended the youth to be a yokel, but either his comic technique requires such overstatement, or he and his scenarists felt the public cannot comprehend innocence in any less dripping form...

...posture (and imposture) of righteous indignation...

...Concomitantly, Ben is presented as an idealistic, sensitive, confused innocent, as well as an inordinately tongue-tied, slow-on-the-uptake simpleton, innocence becoming tantamount to obtuseness and clumsiness...

...For that matter, can we, nowadays, buy the notion of a graduate—even from an Eastern college—who is still a virgin...

...Photographed with everything from reverse angle to helicopter shots, and with Simon and Garfunkel's songs obstreperously dogging it, that car very nearly drives the film to vehicular suicide...

...Mrs...

...Many have pointed out that it breaks in two somewhere around the middle—when from outrageous comedy or flagrant farce it switohes to sentimental near-drama...

...His father, oily and officious, must nag and embarrass him without surcease while Mom supplies an obbligato of fluttery giggles...

...Robinson, and succeeds in making this outre Fury very nearly human and believable...

...Clearly Hollywood has overdone the What Are Our Kids Coming To...

...Robinson is a bundle of dark, inchoate hints...

...if so, the film merely demonstrates the need for post-graduate work...

...Dustin Hoffman, a remarkable character actor, is clearly uncomfortable when reduced to a passive booby...

...Inconsistency is at the very core of the film...

...Here is Ben, the non-stop fumbler, suddenly turned into a master sleuth: The ingeniousness with which he elicits information about the place of the wedding from various people —particularly his resourcefulness with Dr...

...The party his parents give for Ben, the new graduate, is sheer hyperbole...

...Sketchiness creeps into the characterizations and performances as well...

...Many of the scenes are carried to the level of grotesquerie, as, for instance, Ben's birthday party at which he is obliged to give a humiliating exhibition of the frogman outfit his father has bought him...

...Eclecticism characterizes Mike Nichols' directorial style...

...Oversimplification is the easiest to spot: All the adults in the film are ludicrous, corrupt, mean, or at the very least, ineffectual...

...Forthwith we descend into underlining, overdoing, dragging out...

...For the first film that considers the generation gap from youth's point of view to go outrageously—and, I think, with a shrewd eve on the box ollice—in the opposite direction seems equally indefensible...

...Nichols goes so far as to import F.dra Gale, the woman-mountain from 8V2, for a nonspeak-ing bit part...

...Ben and Elaine are a younger Bonnie and Clyde, not forced into crime, but just as specious in their heroism, and pitted against just as simplistically villainous a society...

...Yet, naively and sentimentally, if not duplicitously and jcsu-itically, that is just what the film proposes...

...True, the unsavory genus big businessman, especially the garish California species, complete with females even deadlier than their castrated males, is quickly pinned to the screen...

...The old device of pantomime shot through a windshield after the convertible top has been lowered is resorted to at the very moment when hearing the words that bring Elaine and Ben, the car's occupants, together would be most helpful...

...Minor inconsistencies abound...

...Finally, the supreme inconsistency is not in any of these lapses, but in the basic impossibility of accepting the sudden change of Candide into an amalgam of Romeo...

...Others, championing the film, have argued that the two elements are interwoven throughout, and that true love for Elaine, the Robinson daughter, is supposed to transform Ben into a romantic figure and justify the partial change of tone...

...the two young lovers, on the other hand, are honest, idealistic, pure, lovable, and, if you don't look very closely, not particularly deficient mentally...

...Let us examine these one by one...

...Like a time machine, it transports us to earlier films: 8V2, Juliet of the Spirits, A Man and a Woman, Godard's oeuvre —even the embracing primates in the monkey house from Dear John are there...

...This may not be incredible if we assume love makes men out of boys overnight, but we cannot suppose so swinging a film would hold so square a notion...

...The movie's principal weaknesses are oversimplification, overelabora-tion, inconsistency, eclecticism, obviousness, pretentiousness, and, especially in the penultimate section, sketchiness...

...When they finally run off with each other, the film labors to make us feel that, thanks to them, there's hope for the world...

...In the end, though, the film is a piece of calculated pseudo-innocence...

...A few taboos are, indeed, broken...

...Paul Simon's lyrics alternate between nauseating poeticism ("Hello darkness, my old friend . . . Silence like a cancer grows . . . The words of the prophet are written on the subway wall . . . The sound of silence" ) and trashy folksiness ("Here's to you...

...Anne Bancroft burns with a black flame as Mrs...