Film

Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in New York, plus articles, trailers and more
 

The Group (1966)

Director: Sidney Lumet

Average user rating
No reviews

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Basically soap opera, but a beautifully crafted and brilliantly acted adaptation of Mary McCarthy's novel chronicling the fortunes of eight Vassar graduates, class of '33, up to the beginning of World War II. Sidney Buchman's script does a remarkable tailoring job on the book, pruning away all the fat and cutting the rest into hundreds of sharp little scenes which are pieced together as an attractively witty mosaic of the decade. Particularly clever is the way in which the girls, each one neatly and distinctively characterised, are seen to evolve personality-wise: looking, for instance, at the Dottie (Hackett) of the last scenes - proud wife of an Arizona oil-man, growing slightly hatchet-faced and probably a pillar of the local ladies' league - and remembering her first, despairingly daring affair with a Greenwich Village painter, one thinks with astonishment that's exactly how she would turn out. Should the lengthy array of amorous hopes and disillusionments threaten boredom, there's always Boris Kaufman's wonderfully handsome camerawork to admire.

Author: TM 0000-00-00 00:00:00

Time Out Film Guide

  • Print this page
  • Send to a friend

What do you think?
Post your review now

clear rating
Min 1 star. Zero stars will be treated as unrated.

*mandatory fields


Cast & crew

Director: Sidney Lumet

Producer: Sidney Buchman

Cast: Candice Bergen, Joan Hackett, Elizabeth Hartman, Shirley Knight, Joanna Pettet, Mary-Robin Redd, Jessica Walter, Kathleen Widdoes, James Broderick, Larry Hagman, Richard Mulligan full cast

Duration: 150 mins


Features

Making a name for himself

Making a name for himself

Sin Nombre's Cary Joji Fukunaga learned his lessons well.

To the letter

Forty years later, Costa-Gavras's Z still brims with fury.

Mind over matter

David Cronenberg reflects on a most bizarre body: his own corpus of work.

Fool's gold

Can an Oscar win lead to a cursed career? Here are five stories of postaward professional meltdowns.

We are the championed

Terrorists and teens abound in this year's "Film Comment Selects."

A history of violence

Matteo Garrone's kaleidoscopic Gomorrah wallops you with Italy's crime crisis.

True romantic

James Gray exchanges urban amorality for amour in Two Lovers.

Playing in the dark

MoMA salutes pianist Stuart Oderman's 50 years as the one-man sound of silents.

Junk bonds

Cast and crew recall the making of the classic NYC drug drama The Panic in Needle Park.