The Group (1966)

It follows the life of eight American college women friends, after they graduate in 1933. They are: the aristocratic lesbian (who assembled the group in college and moves to Europe after graduation); the introverted one, who has a tendency to take pity on people, her men included; the bitchy one who works for a publisher; the artistic type who marries a scumbag and is forced to work at a department store; the "sexless" one who cannot decide on an occupation; the politically liberal who marries a reactionary and keeps having babies; the sexually liberal who gets hurt and marries money; and another one who is a bit of an enigma and frankly seems totally superfluous to the film.

It took an extraordinary amount of energy for me to get into this film, and once I got that going, it was only modestly rewarding. I have to be frank about these women: their lives are not that interesting, especially as told in such a hurried, superficial fashion as it is done here. It seems to me that there is a certain misconception about it because this is not exactly a film about women; men make for a lot of the proceedings, and are just as interesting characters (often more so) as the female portion. Taken in isolation, there are several interesting situations or sequences in the film (the satire of psychoanalysis and marxism that is Polly's lover, for instance, is a highlight) and also many witty, and even laugh-out-loud funny lines of dialogue. The sum total of these parts, however, is a bit of a let-down. What interested me most was the opportunity to better understand some subtleties of the liberal mind, and the definitely feminine character that defines it. This is best seen in the 'Priss' character, a fragile woman who lives a contradiction and describes her husband's family resentfully as "all republicans" (he defines liberalism in a slightly crude but essentially correct way as concerning oneself with "the bread line"). This is not to say that women cannot be conservative, and we have good examples all over the world; perhaps we could say that women are just more easily led, more gullible than men.

Rating: 55