Failed Graduate

By J.C

The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker is derived from a book by Charles Webb, who wrote the novel The Graduate. It is directed by Lawrence Turman, who produced the film of The Graduate. Its hero, William Alren, might well be Graduate Ben Braddock after a couple of years of wedded atrophy. But Marriage is neither as facile nor as funny as The Graduate, and Richard Benjamin, who plays the stockbroker, comes off like a dry-cleaned Dustin Hoffman.

Alren's job is an enervating drag and his marriage a ritual of programmed indifference. For kicks he takes up voyeurism. One night his wife Lisa (Joanna Shimkus) discovers him spying on a teen-age swim party and promptly takes off for her sister's. Alren makes several attempts to lure her back, each stymied by Lisa's obstinacy or the pseudopsychological prattering of her sister Nan (Elizabeth Ashley), who has, it seems, a good deal more than an amateur analyst's interest in her brother-in-law. She makes frequent trips to his beachside bachelor lair. At one point she practically unravels her bathing suit in an attempt to interest him. He remains impassive throughout.

What finally shakes Alren up is a stumblebum encounter with a sullen nymphomaniac (Tiffany Boiling). He takes a plane to Mexico, gets a quickie divorce, and, without explanation or motivation, promptly returns for his exwife, whom he seduces in the linen closet of the country club. "There are no answers," he announces with the pride of someone who has solved the riddie of the Sphinx. "You've just got to start by starting." So saying, he takes Lisa, clad only in a towel, and charges across the well-populated lawn of the country club like Ben Braddock dashing out of the church. As Alren and Lisa jump into their car and head for a happy ending, a white towel comes sailing out the window and floats slowly to earth.

The message, if it can be called that, seems to be that the remedy for marital discord is a coupling in the linen closet, that rebellion is raising a ruckus at the country club, and that happiness is a discarded towel. As Turman and Scriptwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. (Pretty Poison) go for the simple solution, they favor the easy laugh. "Relax, enjoy the air," Alren tells Lisa, and there is a quick cut to a truck spewing exhaust. There are, in addition, the usual number of shafts directed at high-priced psychiatrists, high-pressure businessmen and--everybody's favorite--middle-class hypocrisy. These are bruised, battered and safe targets that are certain to survive such limp assaults as The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker.

J.C.

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