The Group

In the old days, when Hollywood was still writing its own stuff, a movie "based on" a best-selling novel usually had the blurb: "You've read the book; now see the movie." Mary McCarthy's The Group has definitely been read (certainly Chapters 2 and 6 at the very least) and on the assumption that the public was willing to sit through two hours and forty-five minutes of a dramatized Eight Little Vassar Graduates and How They Grew, Hollywood went ahead. The surprise ending to this familiar pattern is that they've not only turned out a faithful rendering of that interesting tome, but have in fact surpassed it. The Group is the Hollywood story in reverse: it would have been far better to have seen the movie, then read the book.

The Group is, of course, that ivory tower collection of eight little girls who go from Vassar '33 to Maturity '40, with a lot of politics, philosophy, and sex along the way. The film opens with a Commencement speech and booming alma mater refrains (which, unfortunately, reappear in the movie at the most unseemly times, like after an attempted rape) but from there on the story definitely gets better.

Mary McCarthy chose character study rather than plot to get her through those seven years, and the movie has followed her example. Dottie (Joan Hackett) of Chapter 2 fame, is from Boston and decides to lose her virginity with a Greenwich Village artist. Helena (Kathleen Widdoes) is the daughter of an industrialist, sexually "neuter" and Valedictorian. Libby (Jessica Walter) is a bitch who becomes a career woman in the publishing world. Polly (Shirly Knight) runs metabolism tests because the money ran out for her doctor's education, and keeps a delightfully insane father. Priss (Elizabeth Hartman) worked for NRA, then married and went through mental agonies over breast-feeding. Kay (Joanna Pettet), whose marriage begins the action of the story and whose death ends it, marries a failure who eventually beats her and nearly drives her insane--but she can't let The Group know she's made an unsuccessful marriage. Pokey (Mary-Robin Redd) is fat, funny, and fertile (two sets of twins, my dear), and finally, Lakey (Candace Bergen) is the aloof aesthete who is a lesbian.

If all this sounds like soap opera material, it is, but good soap opera. And what makes it rise above the level it deserves is the truly exceptional acting of the eight girls involved. All the performances are first-rate, particularly Joanna Pettet as Kay.

The failures of The Group are almost directly related to the material with which it deals. Because there is no defined plot, the girls must all develop their own individual stories--and there are simply too many of them for the screen. In its desire to tell the story a la McCarthy, the film tries to cram everything into its focus; so much of the book must be told via telephone conversations and alumnae jottings. But where the movie succeeds, aside from the fine acting, is in giving the audience a visual taste of the 1930's from the floppy hats and long dresses to the "modern" furniture with which Kay decorates her apartment.

The story is livelier on the screen, and some scenes, like Kay's climactic fight with Harold, are far more effective here than in McCarthy's off-hand prose. You may not particularly care about Priss's breast-feeding, Libby's ambitions, or Dottie's frustrations. but somehow the movie takes you in, gives you a sense of the comedy, the gossip, and finally the tragedy of the group's lives. I don't know if the group' reaction to communism, psychoanalysis, and sex is typical of the 30's but it seems right in the movie. The Group is old hat, '33 to be exact, but well done old hat.