CINEMA
Odd Man Out
The Group. (London Pavilion, 'X' certificate.) Orro PREMINCER recently sued Columbia Films because, he claimed, the insertion of as many as fifteen commercials into television showings of his films destroyed their artistic merit. This is a point of view. though possibly Mr Preminger would have had a stronger case if he had allowed that most of his films had a built-in commercial, making further interpola- tions redundant. Which brings me to The Group, a film that would positively benefit from com- mercials. especially if they were for Cosmopoli- tan, Good Housekeeper or Nova. This is a pity. The film, after all, is based on a novel by Mary McCarthy. and was made by Sidney Lumet, a director of undoubted talent and intelligence.
The Group tells the story of eight girls who graduate from Vassar in 1933, taking them through the depression to 1939 and the outbreak of war. There are simply far too many charac- ters and events to keep track of, and for the first twenty minutes, as we darted with febrile haste from girl to girl, I hardly knew who was who or what was what. These introductory scenes spill over with detail and information, often about characters we have not yet met, so that the girls tend to talk not so much like people as like synopses. In the briefest of restaurant scenes, for instance, Libby will tell Pokey that Priss has given up Harold for Jim and Hitler's on the march again and then, wham, we're on a train and Kay is reading a letter from Helena to Priss which is all about Dottie and how terrible the depression is. On and on we go, dizzily. Mr Lumet, forced to establish his characters in whip- lash time, telegraphs them in the most obvious manner. So Lakcy, who is going to turn out a lesbian, wears a bowler hat in her first scene. Libby, the gossip, never does anything but, and Dottie, who is to end a soak, always has a drink in her hand. There are annoying clichés, too. For instance, a stage Jew of a New York Trotskyite who is forever smiling, his nose crinkly, and actually says,'You're velcome.' On the other hand, some long individual scenes are finely wrought and have a nice satirical edge, like the ones between Polly and the left-wing publisher who is blocked in analysis.
The trouble is we no sooner become interested in one girl's plight then off we zoom to another wedding, another party. There is a good deal of straight talk about breast-feeding, sex deviation, contraception and love-making, which unfortunately radiates a certain smugness. As if to say, be grateful, this is real, this is honest. This, I'm sorry to say, is also the cultural-lag 'serious' films suffer from. It is real and honest if you were brought up on TV or Walt Disney films: if not, not. Being 'adult' isn't enough, it is also necessary to be perceptive.
There is, incidentally, only one man in The Group who is not the epitome of boorishness, and it seems central to the plot that after marriage the girls not only remain astonishingly intimate with girls they went to college with, but forge no new friendships. Not on their own or through marriage or work. Surely it is the common complaint of most wives that after marriage her friends are dropped and she is expected to accommodate the husband's friends? Finally. The Group is basically gossip. Now I enjoy gossip. but it has to be either about people I know or the famous. This is gossip about strangers, most of them two-dimensional.
MORDECAI RICHLER
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