The Group

Eight women at a Vassar-like college during the Depression become close friends in this 1966 drama adapted from the 1954 novel by Mary McCarthy. Candice Bergen is top-billed as the maverick Lakey, who runs off to Europe and returns arm-in-arm with a German countess, but the film mainly focuses on the women who remain behind looking for love, marriage, or a meaningful career. Jessica Walter is most memorable as the high-living group gossip, Joan Hackett has an affair with a bohemian artist (Richard Mulligan) in which she feels love (but he doesn’t), Shirley Knight is a hospital nurse with a mentally unstable father, and Elizabeth Hartman is an idealist whose devotion to Roosevelt’s New Deal is smothered by a controlling conservative husband who turns her pregnancy into a social experiment. Joanna Pettet, Mary-Robin Redd, and Kathleen Widdoes fill out the group, while James Broderick, Larry Hagman, and Hal Holbrook are some of the men in their lives. The Group tries to engage issues being raised in the 1960s through the prism of the 1930s, but it fails to successfully evoke the earlier period and too often slips into high-toned soap opera bordering on parody. Sidney Lumet, usually a strong director of actors, stumbles while trying to embrace the large ensemble and sprawling, rambling screenplay. And this film about the lives of women is directed, scripted, and produced by men, which may help explain its often awkward and arch presentation. Ultimately, this is a cinematic artifact from the dying days of the Production Code when adult issues were still being tangentially addressed, although it does feature the film debuts of Bergen and Holbrook. Optional. (S. Axmaker)