tt0060479.mp4
The Group (1966)
Directors
Stars
The Group
Overview
The lives of a group of eight friends, who are seen as the aesthetes of the Vassar class of 1933, are presented from their graduation, when their lives held so much promise despite the Depression, to the start of WWII. Ambitious theater major Kay, somewhat the outsider of the group, decides to get married immediately and support her struggling playwright husband Harald by getting a job at Macy's than pursue her own theater directing career. Kay, who takes everything personally, needs to be in control, which becomes more difficult as problems emerge in the marriage and as world events occur around her. The only one who may be more ambitious is English major Libby, who wants a job in publishing and whose bravada hides her insecurities when not getting what she wants. The exact opposite is Dottie, an inexperienced proper Bostonian who may settle for second best much as she strove for what she really wanted despite she coming to the understanding that she was less than second best. Chemistry major Polly, who wanted to be a doctor but becomes a medical technician, deals with people with real or perceived psychological problems, both at work and in her personal life. Politically involved Priss knows that love and politics may not mesh, but doesn't like feeling like a science experiment as a replacement to love. Artist Helena, who plans on becoming a nursery school teacher, is the communicator who reports the goings-on of her friends to their other classmates. Wealthy Pokey can afford a life of leisure in marriage, for which she strives. And beautiful art history major Lakey, who can get any man she wants, heads to Europe following graduation to further her art history experience, but her trip may be as much to get away from her Vassar life and head for freedom.
The Group Film Details
Overview: After graduating from a prestigious Eastern university, eight devoted women friends go their separate ways: one leaves for Europe, while the others experience troubled relationships. Sadly, they get to meet one last time as a group.
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Review: Sidney Lumet is a masterful craftsman of socially aware drama that tackles important cultural questions, and even for its time, which was a time of radical social change that beginning to reflect on theater screens, The Group treated some divisive themes, for example the association of free love with progressive social revolution, and depicting it as a forerunner of a new anti-fascistic, anti-oppressive awareness and critique of marriage as a form of social bondage, not to mention contraception, abortion, lesbianism and mental illness. And owing to Lumet’s subtle use of technical skills, The Group—possibly his biggest, least characteristic and least considered film—is a skillfully paced and giftedly acted adaptation of Mary McCarthy’s novel charting the kismet of eight Vassar graduates, class of ’33, up to the start of WWII. Sidney Buchman’s script does some outstanding couture work on the material, clipping away all the adipose tissue and slashing the remaining into hundreds of pointed little scenes which are assembled as a charmingly droll montage of the decade, though Lumet’s concerns are towards the thematic nature of McCarthy’s story rather than the setting. Joanna Pettet is quite convincing as the one who marries Larry Hagman’s prototype self-destructive aspiring writer, there’s an impressive debut by Kathleen Widdoes, and as does the great Hal Holbrook, and Candice Bergen as a Paris refugee who returns courted by a German countess. But the most memorable performance for me is by Jessica Walter, who is now exercising great comic ability on a wholly new generation of television such as Arrested Development and Archer. There is a real conflict between who she is on the inside and out that she portrays so authentically and epitomizes a familiar but difficult-to-depict personality. Also Joan Hackett, in a BAFTA-nominated debut performance of her own, provides an especially varied array of emotional conversion. And willowy, eye-catching ginger leading lady Elizabeth Hartman displays her versatility between her upper-class collegiate role here and the capricious, heartbreaking flirt she played in Francis Ford Coppola’s debut film You’re a Big Boy Now the same year. Director of Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Pawnbroker, Murder on the Orient Express, Dog Day Afternoon and Network, Lumet is noted for drawing award-winning performances from his casts. Chiefly cunning in this, his tenth film, is the way in which the girls, each one elegantly and idiosyncratically characterized, are seen to develop individually. For example viewing the Hackett of the closing scenes, bigheaded wife of an Arizona oil-man, subtly changing physically as well, and almost certainly a mainstay of the local ladies’ league, and recalling her first, desperately bold affair with a Greenwich Village painter, one thinks with amazement that’s just how she might become. With Boris Kaufman’s superbly striking cinematography to appreciate, the Kurosawa-style multi-plane tableaux of various characters in single painterly shots, demonstrating a poetic and caring property in his capturing of these layered images, a quality that marked his extraordinarily noble career, The Group is a vividly experiential chronicle of the girl-to-woman sexual and social transitions as the characters try on sex, religion and politics. It’s the thinking viewer’s Sex and the City.
Country: United States
Language: English
Duration: 150 min
Genre: Drama
Also known as: A csoport,Klikken,Przyjaciółki,The Group,Ryhmä,グループ,Le groupe,Групата,Группа,Il gruppo,Osa kryvei o ouranos,Il gruppo e le sue passioni,Група,Die Clique,O Grupo,Gänget,De groep,O Grupo do Colégio,Gruppen,El grupo
