College graduate Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) comes home to his affluent Southern California family with little if any idea of what he's going to do with his life. While paying a courtesy visit to his parents' longtime friend Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), Benjamin is shocked when the lady comes on to him. Nevertheless, he enters into an affair with Mrs. Robinson, attempting naively to establish a warm relationship with the older woman, who only has sex on her mind. Things get sticky when Benjamin falls in love with Mrs. R's daughter Elaine (Katherine Ross). Utterly opposed to this relationship, Mrs. Robinson pulls strings to discredit Benjamin in the eyes of her daughter (without, of course, going so far as to confess to the affair). Benjamin permits himself to be battered around by his elders until he finally takes a rebellious stand, swooping down from the church balcony at Elaine's wedding and carrying her off to an uncertain future. A tremendous improvement upon the James Webb novel on which it was based, The Graduate was molded by director Mike Nichols and scenarists Calder Willingham and Buck Henry into a clarion call for the Children of the Sixties, who like Benjamin felt themselves entrapped in a world they never made. Much of the film's success is due to its flawless casting (one can only speculate what the results would have been had the producers been able to get their first choices for Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson-Robert Redford and Doris Day, respectively!) 29-year-old stage actor Dustin Hoffman won the title role because of a "bad" audition: his stumbling, hesitant line deliveries happened to be just what Nichols was looking for. The film's famous last shot, with Benjamin and Elaine sitting dazedly on a bus bound for who-knows-where, was reportedly the result of Nichols' ill humor; he was so touchy on the day the scene was filmed that Hoffman and Katherine Ross were afraid to respond to him, hence the deer-in-the-headlights look in their eyes. The icing on The Graduate's cake was its perfection-plus musical score, composed and performed by Simon and Garfunkel ("Sounds of Silence", "Scarborough Fair", and, of, course "Mrs. Robinson"). Keep an eye out for several well-known performers in bit roles, notably Richard Dreyfuss as an obstreperous Berkeley student. And don't forget one word, just one word: Plastics!