THE GROUP 1966

The generic Hollywood “woman’s film,” those melodramatic, get-out-your-handkerchiefs – style weepies that were once Joan Crawford’s and Bette Davis’ stock in trade, underwent a colorful (that is to say, increasingly explicit) transformation during the '50s and '60s. Reflecting the changing role of women in American culture, the once romance-centric genre transmogrified into the multi-character, hand-wringing, career-girl soap operas of the sort typified by Rona Jaffe’s water cooler drama The Best of Everything (1956), in which Joan Crawford’s stock '40s shopgirl character gets an executive upgrade, and that deservedly iconic ode to Broadway, booze, and barbiturates, Valleyof the Dolls (1967).

Jessica Walter (Lucille Bluth on my favorite TV show, Arrested Development) looks "Joan Crawford fabulous" and almost walks away with the film as Libby, the least sympathetic but most dynamic member of The Group

These films dramatized, in highly glamorized fashion, the challenges facing women as they strove to balance love, friendship, and the pursuit of their dreams while navigating the patriarchally hostile waters of the American workforce. Always purporting to “blow the lid off” one taboo subject or another (in George Cukor’s The Chapman Report it was the sex lives of suburban housewives) these films offered at most a cursory nod to female independence before reverting to type and getting back to the business of subtly endorsing traditional gender roles.

Valley of the Dolls, in its exquisite awfulness, remains the gold standard by which every “sex and soap” women’s film is and should be compared. But one of my favorite forgotten examples of the genre that managed to fall through the cracks due to past unavailability (it had a brief VHS life [Thanks, Poseidon3!], was never released on Laserdisc, but is currently available on made-to-order DVD) is Sidney Lumet’s lively screen adaptation of Mary McCarthy’s 1963 bestselling novel, The Group. 

Eight is Enough
The sparkling cast of up-and-comers that comprise The Group

I don’t know who first coined the phrase “superior soap opera” but the term categorically applies to this expensively mounted, surprisingly well-acted tale of the interweaving lives of eight friends—graduates of Vassar College, Class of ’33— as each sets out to make her mark on the world. The experiences of these economically and psychologically diverse heroines reflect, in microcosm, the emergent state of (white) American womanhood in the mid-20^th century. Specifically, the Roosevelt Administration years from The Great Depression through to the earliest days of the outbreak of WW II.
As each woman embarks on the journey of realizing the American Dream that their wealth, position, and privilege have practically guaranteed them, they discover that life outside the protective bubble of college and "The Group" poses considerably greater challenges. 

With a cast of eight beautiful women all falling histrionically in and out of love, bedrooms, and careers, The Group basically takes the usual all-girl triad formula of The Pleasure Seekers and Three Coins in the Fountain (along with the aforementioned The Best of Everything and Valley of the Dolls) and merely ratchets up the stakes by moving it into territory first blazed by Clare Boothe Luce in The Women. All of which is sheer Nirvana for fans of camp cinema and movies about high-born women brought to low circumstances, but a headache for studio publicity departments and folks seeking economic ways of recounting the plot and summarizing the characters.  

The challenge presented in having to promote a film with an ensemble cast of relative unknowns is revealed in the giggle-inducing tone adopted by the film’s ad campaign; the copy of which I’ll borrow to briefly introduce the members of The Group:

Lakey: The Mona Lisa of the smoking-room…for women only!

Dottie: Thin women are more sensual. The nerve endings are closer to the surface.

Priss: She fell in love and lived to be an “experiment.”

Polly: No money…no glamour…no defenses…poor Cinderella.

Kay: The “outsider” at an Ivy League Ball.

Pokey: Skin plumped full of oysters…money, money, money…yum, yum, yum!

Libby: A big scar on her face called a mouth.

Helena: Many women do without sex, and thrive on it.

If I remember correctly, most, if not all of these lines come directly from the novel (a terrific read, I might add) and several are even repeated in the film. How anyone was able to resist such sleazily salacious come-ons is beyond me, but The Group didn’t fare too well at the boxoffice at the time and slipped quietly into obscurity after that. My guess is that it’s because the film at its core wasn’t really as trashy as its hard-sell. Well, more’s the pity, for The Group, by benefit of its remarkable cast and director Sidney Lumet’s deft handling of the wide-sweeping plot, is a step above the usual glossy soap opera.

Dottie (Joan Hackett) loses her virginity to emotionally remote artist Dick Brown (Richard Mulligan). In real life, Hackett & Mulligan were married from 1966 to 1973. They appeared together in a 1971 episode of  Love, American Style

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

As a fan of both Robert Altman’s trademark ensemble opuses and movies with overdressed women dramatically suffering in opulent surroundings, there isn’t really much to dislike about The Group. Touching on everything from politics, birth-control, lesbianism, marriage, mental illness, spousal abuse, adultery, childbirth, alcoholism, and date-rape (all in the course of 2 ½ hours) The Group has a lot of field to cover. Director Sidney Lumet (The Pawnbroker, Network, Dog Day Afternoon) keeps things moving at a rapid-fire pace that adds spark to the light comedy (Jessica Walter is a hoot as a bitchily gabby gossip) and tension to the drama. If the expeditious pacing of the story spares The Group from ever being plodding or dull, it's fair to say it also occasionally undercuts the film’s overall emotional impact. The commitment to brevity that results in Joan Hackett’s character disappearing for a protracted time in the middle of the film is a considerable flaw as far as I'm concerned, but at least it’s a flaw born of an attempt to tighten the sprawling narrative. 

An example of Sidney Lumet's masterful framing and use of space in The Group 

I generally just like the propulsive feel of The Group's visual style. I can’t remember when I’ve seen a movie that handled the staging and filming of group scenes better or to greater effect; nor can I recall a cleverer employment of cinematic devices to provide plot exposition. In rewatching the film, my attention is drawn to the many subtle character interactions and small details (like the financially-struggling Kay always wearing the same hat to every wedding) easily overlooked on first viewing due to the film’s quick cutting and Lumet’s skillful use of the foregrounds and backgrounds to relay information.

When I think of what I like about The Group, the conclusion I always arrive at is, what’s not to like?

The telephone features prominently in The Group not only as a means by which the friends stay in contact but as a handy device to relate plot exposition

PERFORMANCES

If you’ve ever harbored the notion that a film like, say, Valley of the Dolls would have been “better” with real actresses in the roles (sorry Patty Duke), watching The Group should pretty much lay that fantasy to rest. The cast assembled for The Group couldn’t be more accomplished or better-suited to their roles, but even they can’t surmount a screenplay or a basic story construct so plot-driven. The mere volume and frequency of crises and conflict in films like these reduce even exemplary performances (Hackett, Knight, Pettet, and Hartman) to “best of” moments.

Sidney Lumet cast his father, Baruch Lumet in the small role of Mr. Schneider, Polly's paternal neighbor

A standout, both appearance and character-wise, is Jessica Walter, who either annoys or enchants in a showy role that is essentially Rosalind Russell in The Women. Also very good is the highly appealing Shirley Knight. My personal favorite, however, is Joan Hackett (making her film debut along with Bergen and Pettet) whom I never tire of watching and who never seems to hit a false note.

60s lesbians were always portrayed as severe, vaguely predatory types who stood around giving each other knowing looks under arched eyebrows. Here, an admittedly outclassed Candice Bergen introduces her sorority sisters to her "friend" the Baroness (Lidia Prochnicka)

Before I finish, special mention must be made of the men in The Group. True to the genre, the men are a pretty odious bunch. Almost to a man they are characterized as weak, bigoted, manipulative, oppressive, brutalizing, or womanizing. Some all at the same time. This is of course to be expected and goes with the soap opera territory. What surprises me most is that there isn’t a single looker in the bunch. I know it’s a matter of taste and I'm taking into account that perhaps in 1966 these guys passed for handsome (so what was Paul Newman?); but to a most distracting degree, the men at the center of The Group are like a grandmother’s wish-list of desirable males. Hal Holbrook? Larry Hagman? Richard Mulligan? James Broderick? The film features such a parade of sexless, daddy-fixation types that after a while I actually started to take it as some kind of personal affront. Valley of the Dolls suffered from the same malady.

No, this isn't an image of Polly (Shirley Knight) and her father. This is Gus (Hal Holbrook) the patently implausible object of desire of two gorgeous women and one unseen wife in The Group

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
My older sister (whom I credit/blame for a good deal of my love of bad movies) got me to watch The Group on TV with her when I was a kid. A protofeminist if ever there was one, she tended to gravitate towards movies with female protagonists but lamented the fact that a great majority of these films tended to be vaguely masochistic soaps and cheesy exploitation films. 

The Group was Elizabeth Hartman's follow-up to her Oscar-nominated film debut in A Patch of Blue. As Priss, she's cast again as a victim of an oppressive relative, this time a husband.
 Sloan (her physician husband, following a miscarriage): "We'll, we can't have this again, Priss. Worst possible advertisement for a pediatrician!"

My sister (who was drawn to the bitchiness of the Libby character but identified with the self-sacrificing nobility of Polly) enjoyed the camp fun to be had at the expense of the fancy clothes, elaborate hairstyles, and frankly unsympathetic milieu of the privileged classes; but what she also responded to, and in turn helped me to appreciate, was what the film was trying to say about the challenges of maturity. The idealized vision of the world (and oneself) one can safely harbor while sheltered within the walls of youth and academia can take quite a beating when confronted by the disappointments and compromises of the real world. Is a person really failing in life if they put to rest youthful dreams in hopes of achieving some unforeseen, yet perhaps more authentic, realization of fulfillment? And how much pain does one cause oneself clinging to idealized illusions of "potential" and entitled success...all the while ignoring the possibility for happiness dressed in humbler clothing? 

Have to hand it to my sister...if she could find that kind of insight within a glossy potboiler like this, I'd say I learned about the value of "bad" films at the feet of a master.

In a role rendered considerably smaller in the film than  in the book, Carrie Nye has at least one memorable scene as Norine, a low-income Vassar classmate and outsider excluded from The Group 

Now, I’m not going to make out like The Group is some kind of profound, unacknowledged classic, but in light of what women's films have become over the years (they proudly proclaim themselves "chick flicks" and celebrate shopping as a valid expression of female empowerment), and in our current boomerang culture that doesn't encourage young people to seek and accept struggle as an integral part of the growing-up process; well...let's just say that there's something to be said for a 46-year-old guilty-pleasure movie that comes across as more progressive and perceptive in 2012 than it did in the year of its original release.

Halcyon Days
Helena's scandalous painting of The Group (that's Helena as the satyress)

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2012

YOU'RE A BIG BOY NOW 1966

Coming-of-age films have always been with us, but they really came into their own during the youth-obsessed '60s. The post-Baby Boom "youthquake" of the '60s, which impacted American culture in ways both social and economic, was the perfect breeding ground for films pertaining to social rebellion, sexual awakening, and the challenging of authority. As a genre, coming-of-age films were tailor-made for the New Hollywood. A Hollywood desperate to court the new-found economic clout of the young through "personal" films populated with anti-heroes and comprised of romanticized depictions of the struggles of the post-adolescent set (almost always male). Given that coming-of-age films have also always afforded ample opportunities for sex, drugs, and the baring of female flesh, it's not surprising that Hollywood's old-guard (usually rather reluctant to respond to change) proved so receptive to even the more way-out, avant-garde entries in the genre. After all, whether audiences be young or old, sex always sells.

Time has granted Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967) the uncontested title of representative coming-of-age film for a generation, but my favorite entry in cinema’s “pain of growing up” sweepstakes is this delightfully offbeat comedy from a young Francis Ford Coppola (only twenty-seven at the time). You’re a Big Boy Now was Coppola's first film for a major studio as well as his master's thesis submission to the UCLA film school, and as such, displays an engagingly youthful lack of discipline and the novice filmmaker's fondness for camera trickery...two things that don't exactly qualify as liabilities in '60s films.

Elizabeth Hartman as Barbara Darling

Peter Kastner as Bernard Chanticleer

Geraldine Page as Mrs. Chanticleer

Julie Harris as Miss Thing

Rip Torn as Mr. Chanticleer

Karen Black as Amy Partlett

You’re a Big Boy Now is about the misadventures of Bernard (scornfully nicknamed “Big Boy” by his self-centered father), a woefully under-experienced 19-year-old who, at the insistence of his father and against the protests of his obsessively over-protective mother, goes off to live on his own in Manhattan. Bernard’s naiveté and propensity to lose himself in flights of fantasy consistently get him into trouble as he attempts to navigate life and love along the bumpy path to adult independence.

Given how male writers and filmmakers never seem to tire of wistful, semi-autobiographical tomes hearkening back to the days of their sexual awakening; there’s never been a shortage of these “rites of passage” films to choose from. Indeed, one could probably fill an airplane hangar with them. Inherently similar in tone, most suffer from a kind of willful masculine myopia and gender fear which finds endless charm in the sexual fumblings of doltish, socially awkward, physically unattractive, emotionally superficial young men who nonetheless feel they rate the designated "dream girl" figure. Being the wish-fulfillment fantasies they are, our callow hero usually does get the longed-for beauty, but it’s a certainty that before the end credits roll, said dream girl will reveal herself to be somehow undeserving of his noble affections (take THAT pretty girls who snubbed the director in high-school!).

Message  Received: Women Are Terrifying

You’re a Big Boy Now doesn’t deviate far from this well-trod narrative path, but Coppola invests the proceedings with such creative exuberance (every scene holds at least one element of surprise - whether visually, verbally, or in the goofily straight/comic performances he elicits from his game cast), that the film feels more like a surreal satire of the genre rather than a representative of the genuine article.

Tony Bill as the exotically named Raef del Grado, Bernard's more sexually-assured friend

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Providing, as it does, a subjective view of the overwhelming and perilous adult world as it's perceived by the sheltered Bernard, there is much to enjoy in the film's many eccentric visual flourishes, absurdist characters, and anarchic editing style. With its blaring (and rather good) score of pop songs by The Lovin' Spoonful, You’re a Big Boy Now is a '60s film to its core, complete with an overarching air of reproach directed at middle-class repression and sexual guilt.

"Don't eat too much, don't stay out late, don't go to suspicious places or play cards, and stay away from girls! But most of all Bernard, try to be happy."

I'd always thought of Peter Kastner (right) as looking like a cross between Robert Morse & Michael J Pollard, but a friend nailed it when he said Peter reminded him of Ernie (Barry Livingston) from My Three Sons.
The late Peter Kastner starred in his own TV series in 1968, The Ugliest Girl in Town; about a man who poses as a female model and becomes a boyish fashion sensation, a la Twiggy

PERFORMANCES

The desirable, yet dangerous, female is as much a staple of the coming-of-age film as the virginal hero having a more sexually sophisticated best friend/adviser (in this instance, the appropriately unctuous Tony Bill). When it comes to scary women, You’re a Big Boy Now has probably the most disturbing, dick-withering example of that gynophobic archetype ever to come out of the free-love era: the man-hating, aspiring actress/go-go dancer, Barbara Darling.

The character of Barbara Darling in less capable hands would be just another bitch-goddess cliché, but someone had the inspired genius to cast against type, and the late Elizabeth Hartman manages to be downright chilling, yet terribly funny, in the role. What makes her performance here so amazing is that I saw You're a Big Boy Now only after I had already seen Hartman in A Patch of Blue (1965), The Group (1966), and The Beguiled (1971); all roles emphasizing the gentle, almost fragile vulnerability of this immensely likable actress. Though obviously talented (she was Academy Award® nominated and won the Golden Globe for A Patch of Blue), there is nothing about her performances in any of those films that would lead you to believe she could be so aggressively carnal and convincingly, psychotically, mercurial. In a transformation the likes of which I've rarely seen, the Elizabeth Hartman of her earlier films is nowhere to be seen in You're a Big Boy Now. She gives my favorite performance in the film.

Displaying a surprising range and a flair for comedy, the man-eater of You're a Big Boy Now is light years away from the Elizabeth Hartman in A Patch of Blue.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

You're a Big Boy Now has some great shots of Manhattan and New York's seedy Times Square area that predate the gritty images in Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Klute (1971). It's fun seeing theater marquees advertising films like Born Free and The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

What's fun about watching the early works of accomplished directors is trying to catch a glimpse of some kind of nascent artistry or budding style that would later emerge as a defining trait or characteristic of their work. To look at the early films of Roman Polanski or Woody Allen is to see the beginnings of a style and preoccupation with themes they continue to bring to their work even to this day.

Watching You're a Big Boy Now, I was left with two thoughts: 1) with this film's pre-MTV kinetic rhythms, how is it that all of Coppola's subsequent musical outings (Finian's Rainbow, One From the Heart, and The Cotton Club) all turned out so flat?; 2) Coppola shows such a flair for comedy here, I'm surprised he hasn't had many more comedies on his resume.

Although You're a Big Boy Now is not a particularly well-known or talked about title today, Elizabeth Hartman and Geraldine Page were both nominated for Golden Globes for their performances, with Miss Page (married to co-star Rip Torn at the time) garnering an Oscar® nod as well. Best of all (for me, anyway, because I'm such a big fan) the film gave Karen Black her film debut. Pretty classy pedigree for a director's first major film.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2011