The Group

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.

One of the worst pieces of direction by a major director I have ever seen. Was this really the same work of the man who was at the helm of 12 Angry Men? The cast, as good as they were, were spouting lines as though it was a local Amateur dramatics night - the worst was the actor who played Sloane. Jessica Walter and Shirley Knight gave best value in their parts but the whole thing was very segmented and there seemed little flow in the story. As for the fact it was set in the 30's this almost escaped me as there was little period feel either in the art direction or the costume. I kept thinking at one point that Shirley Knight's hairstyle was old fashioned because I was under the impression that it was late 50's or early 60's!! This could have been so much better but was a failure on so many levels. It must have been fairly controversial when first released what with it's reference to lesbianism and breast-feeding. How times have changed! So did Lumet because he became one of my favourite directors. A bizarre start to an illustrious career.

Having seen 4 or 5 other films by Lumet (The network, Critical care, Serpico a.o)I have to say its the worst of him I 've seen so far. That doesnt necessarily make it bad, because its not. It's kind of "layed back" and it wasnt too involving for me, even in dialog part. Sure it was good entertainment seeing it. The scenes with the mad father of Poly are great! Well, I have to say that my mother loved it! Go for the other Lumet films as well if you liked something in that, even if its a lot more different from others from him.

When this movie first debuted the NY Times' Bosley Crowther rightfully panned it, but several other critics gave it good reviews. Hard to believe that anyone could praise a movie with a script filled with leaden dialog, plotting that careens from ridiculous to improbable (proving that Mary McCarthy was not much of a novelist), and editing that makes no logical sense (scenes abruptly shift from one to another without rhyme nor reason). Also, although the movie takes place in the 1930s, the makeup and the costuming are all very early 1960s. There are a few excellent performances in here--Shirley Knight basically carries the movie, and Elizabeth Hartmann and Joan Hackett in smaller roles far outshine the others--but Joanna Pettet is terribly miscast, and Jessica Harper stumbles through a role that no one could have pulled off. All in all, the only reason to watch this is to compare it with its twin sister movie, Valley of the Dolls, for a lesson in how to take a pot-boiler of a novel and turn it into a trainwreck.

I have never reacted to a movie quite as I did this one. At almost every moment I was ready to hit the delete button, but I wound up watching the whole two and a half hours. I liked the concept of following a close-knit group of women from the time they graduated from an exclusive girl's college in 1933 to a decade later when the first of the group dies. It took me a while to absorb enough of the personalities of the eight women to distinguish them and, between the women and their lovers and husbands, you never get to know anyone with much more depth than identifying a dominant personality characteristic. The group dynamics have a certain appeal, but without a deeper understanding of any of the characters I could not develop an emotional attachment to any of them. This undercuts the potential power of the final scenes. There are some memorable performances. Larry Hagman plays Harald Peterson as a J.R. Ewing without any charm - a truly unpleasant person. In fact almost all of the men in this movie are sad examples of the sex. Candice Bergen, as Lakey, creates the the most interesting character, but she gets the least screen time. Robert Emhardt has a grand time playing the manic Mr. Andrews and Hal Holbrook has some good moments as an overly-psychoanalyzed literary editor. Some of the topics were ahead of the time for 1966. I found Dr. Ridgeley's dismissal of Freud in favor of a more biological approach to mental disorders refreshing. And Lakey was not ostracized for her being a Lesbian - even more interesting if that was indeed an attitude at all current in the 1930s. However, my overall reaction was ambivalence.

Ugh! I stuck it out for 45 minutes shaking my head at what I perceived to be the most muddled script in the history of film. What a mess! The poor writer was utterly lost and had no idea where he was going or what he was doing. There are so many things wrong with this film that it's really difficult to sort them all out. Let's see. The casting sucked big time. The women weren't so bad but the men were uniformly horrid - boring, dull, homely - you name it - not one of them got my juices flowing. On top of that the women - and there were way too many women - were for the most part pretty to look at but they had the depth of snails. Who cared if one of the girls lost her virginity? Or if another was a lesbian? There was so much going on that getting to know any of the characters with any depth was impossible. I actually got dizzy trying to figure out who was who and what was going on. Yeah, okay, so it was probably break-through feminism in the movies (it was 1966, after all) and there probably should have been a female director but they didn't have any in 1966 so poor Sidney Lumet was stuck with the job and all he did was direct traffic.

A lackluster soap opera for people who don't like to admit that they watch soap operas, THE GROUP may very well be the lowest energy film ever directed by a top talent: Sidney Lumet. There's a lot of melodrama, backstabbing, bitchiness, and enough male-bashing to make you cringe. Lumet has nonetheless assembled a topnotch cast of future TV-stars...Richard Mulligan, Jessica Walter, Larry Hagman, James Broderick and, in her film debut, Candice Bergen, whose role is so small, it's like she's part of some other fringe GROUP. Based on the Mary McCarthy book and also featuring Elizabeth Hartman, Shirley Knight and, in a brief bit of high-energy, Carrie Nye.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable reworking of Mary McCarthy's book...while certain portions of the story & dialog are toned down from the frank & sexual novel, the gist remains intact. The story of a group of protected collegiate girls during the Depression being plunged into real life...marriage, affairs, career paths, utter meltdown. It's got a definite soap-opera feel & the performances get a bit cartoony here & there, but this movie is a JOY. Just enjoy it for what it is...a couple (plus) hours of fun & involving storytelling, great performances, great clothes, & goofy upper-crust female bonding.

Sidney Lumet directed this busy, bustling, chatty character study-*-soaper concerning eight Vassar graduates in 1933 who take different paths in life but always manage to stay in touch. Writer-producer Sidney Buchman nearly pulls off the heady task of adapting Mary McCarthy's well-loved novel to the screen, despite insurmountable story obstacles, a self-defeating length, and a persistent claim from professional critics at the time that maybe a female screenwriter should have been hired instead to adapt McCarthy's prose (Pauline Kael was the most vocal in this area). With much crisscross editing between apartments, hospitals, and places of employment, it's nearly impossible to determine how many years pass in the course of the story--and this episodic structure leaves Candice Bergen's Lakey and Mary-Robin Redd's Pokey with hardly any screen-time. Joan Hackett as Dottie makes a very appealing impression in her early scenes (falling for heartless womanizer Richard Mulligan), but then she too disappears. There's far too much of Joanna Pettet in the overtly-showy role of Kay (and with her comes Larry Hagman, doing nothing new in the impossible role of Kay's hard-drinking, womanizing husband). Elizabeth Hartman as Priss and Shirley Knight as Polly end up doing the finest acting work, with Knight practically carrying the film's final third--but then, the screenplay is tipped towards our liking those characters the most (if Jessica Walters' gossiping Libby was revealed to have half a heart, we might feel the same towards her). The scattershot humor is there, but it's always undercut by sourness--which is then replaced with grimness. If Buchman was inappropriate as the writer, Lumet was equally a questionable choice as director. He keeps the pacing lively, but the film is far more vitriolic than nostalgic. **1/2 from ****

Homosexuality, frigidity, abortion, mental illness, contraception... Controversial issues are the subject of "The Group," which is why the oblique way they're treated is so disappointing. To be fair, Larry Hagman's character does use the word Lesbo, but by the time he blurts it out, it's long since been obvious to post-Stonewall audiences that "Lakey" is gay. (Several members of this Vassar '33 clique have silly elitist pet names; it's a blessing there's no "Muffin.") Mary McCarthy's bestselling novel had courage; this movie does not. Her satiric edge is gone, replaced by earnestness. The background of 1930s world politics remains, but is used only to shape characters, the way cigarettes are used in films in lieu of actual character development (e.g. Fabulous Baker Boys, Body Heat, Thelma & Louise, everything by Joe Eszterhas). The screenplay by Sidney Buchman ("Mr Smith Goes to Washington," "Holiday") strives for wit, but settles for quips, the worst of which is the tautology, "We madmen are the aristocrats of mental illness." The dialog safely sticks to offbeat subjects like psychoanalysis, or familiar ones like alcoholism and adultery. The biggest issue "The Group" openly tackles is-- believe it or not-- breastfeeding. (Micro-spoiler: they're against women being forced to do it.) The cast is strong, with a few exceptions. Typical of her performances, Elizabeth Hartman is so underwhelming as "Priss" that I concluded she was bedridden not because of troubled pregnancies but because of literal spinelessness. The career of Mary-Robin Redd ("Pokey") descended with good reason to roles like the nameless "Intellectual-Looking Woman" in "Airplane II: The Sequel." In contrast, Shirley Knight's story line has the best performances. Not only is Knight engaging as Polly (in spite of hairdos not equaled in silliness until Princess Leia's cinnamon buns), but she has many scenes with the marvelous, little-remembered James Broderick. The scene where he proposes marriage is a small masterpiece. He balances pragmatism and romanticism in an utterly believable way, and even a seductive one-- quite an accomplishment for an actor who was never a matinée idol. To paraphrase another memorable movie character, Mike Donovan: "There's not much of Broderick in it, but what's there is cherce."