n the opening scene of Mike Nichols' new film, The Graduate, a planeload of passengers bound for Los Angeles listens to their stewardess pleasantly tell them that they are about to land at their destination. The plane comes down smoothly, safely. Everything is as it should be. The scene, however, is worth noting because all the passengers obviously sit encased in rigid anxiety. They stare straight ahead, gripping the armrests of their seats, trying to look casual. It is how I -- and presumably many other people -- make every landing and the grave accuracy of Mike Nichols' observation is very funny.

When the plane lands, the hero of The Graduate, Ben Braddock, gets off with the crowd. He is played by Dustin Hoffman, a short young man with narrow, sloping shoulders, a schnoz of a nose, and a voice that seems to come from a larynx lined with cotton. Ben is a little soft. Easy. Gentle. Intelligent. He brings honors from college with him, as well as a desire to be left alone. And upon his arrival at his family's suburban Spanish villa, it is clear that he is unwilling to make a decision about his future for the moment.

Before he can get his swimming trunks on, however, his parents are pestering him about ambition, their friends are freeloading drinks in honor of his return, and the wife of his father's partner has made an adroit attempt to seduce him. It is not easy. When she finally manages to get her clothes off, Ben's eyeballs begin to roll around his head, he calls for help from the good Lord and, even though he stutters his way to temporary safety, eventually becomes her total victim. And as he does, Ben's young life changes, and so does The Graduate. While it continues to play for laughs, most of them are fairly abrasive, and a peculiar current of nastiness runs through the remainder of the film, like a vein of bad blood.

Everyone who fills Ben's world, except for the girl he falls in love with, is or turns into a cretin, Southern California variety. His mother seems to be at the climax of menopausal mania, shrieking with laughter at the mere suggestion of a joke, hysterical with forced happiness at the prospect of a bride for her son, glumly relentless when she pursues him into the bathroom to find out if he has -- God help him -- a sex life to help fill his empty hours. His father strikes one note whenever he opens his mouth: impeccable fatuousness. His seductress is malevolent, a caved-in alcoholic who is also a nymphomaniac, while her husband blindly makes his epicene way through her intrigues. And so it goes, down to the last walk-on.

When you make a movie you can't have it every way. Nichols and his two screen writers -- Calder Willingham and Buck Henry -- open The Graduate with a real hero living in a real world and conclude with a parody-hero living in a parody-world. The transformation from one to the other is arbitrary. When Ben Braddock has to seize his girl violently from his enemies, he does it in church, while swinging a gold cross overhead as a kind of ironic weapon against hypocrisy and materialism. Every time the nymphomaniac's husband comes near Ben you almost expect him to make a pass at the boy. And why not? In the context of all this pop-styled activity, one "turn" is as good as another.

Still, there are wonderfully funny things in The Graduate. Best of all is Dustin Hoffman's performance. Half the time his Ben Braddock looks as though he's in search of a pebble to kick. He has a little squawk in his throat that escapes in tense moments; you can hear it when he sees a naked woman for the first time. He wants desperately to be the master of the kind of situation that, for one instance, requires the rental of a hotel room for two clandestine lovers, but the very sound of the world "affair" nearly causes his eyes to fall out of his head in fright. On the way through the hotel lobby, all pretended sophistication, he is sure to trip over a perfectly flat carpet. As the woman who seduces him, Anne Bancroft is too strong; she really makes us take her nastiness too seriously. But a striking-looking young woman named Katharine Ross makes a perfect foil for Hoffman's diffident charm; she is all emotion, straightforward and very sure. Together they are an ideal Jack and Jill for contemporary tastes.

- Harper's, 1967.