MOVIES

Dir. Mike Nichols, USA, 1967, PG, 106min, New 35mm Print
 

(1967) “You’re trying to seduce me, Mrs. Robinson... Aren’t you?” Student unrest in bourgeois clothing, as Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock, adrift after college, is craftily seduced by a woman of his parents’ generation: Anne Bancroft’s icily-assured friend-of-the-family Mrs. Robinson (actually only six years Hoffman’s senior). So it’s understandable that Ben’s dream girl Katharine Ross is a bit startled to learn that he’s been sleeping with... her mother. Arguably, no other movie of the 60s — not even Bonnie and Clyde or Easy Rider — turned counterculture angst into popular culture. The biggest box office surprise of the decade, Oscar-winner for second-time-out director Nichols (among seven nominations), and Hoffman’s star-making breakout role, with Simon & Garfunkel’s score starting a new trend in soundtrack music and one anthologizable moment after another: the pool-side graduation party packed with advice-offering adults (“Plastics!”); that famous leg shot (see photo, above); the jittery hotel rendezvous, co-screenwriter Buck Henry’s matter-of-factly querying, “Are you here for an affair, sir?”; the interrupted wedding, with the crucifix crossbar; and the lingering “what happens now?” close-up on the bus. Adapted by Henry and Calder Willingham from the Charles Webb novel. – Film Forum, NYC