DVD: The Group

Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel The Group inspired Candace Bushnell to write Sex and the City, a connection highlighted on this DVD of Sidney Lumet’s 1966 adaptation. Only the breezy style of the newsletter which keeps eight female friends from Vassar’s Class of ‘33 in touch bears real comparison. This is a broader saga about women’s experiences and ambitions in the years up to World War Two.

It’s also an unexpected entry in Lumet’s great series of New York films, as these Manhattan wives, daughters, doctors and socialites grip as strongly as his more familiar male cops and lawyers, moving to the centre of stories which usually sideline them. By turns bleakly realistic and sharply satiric, its two and a half hours whip by.

The way prim, pretty Dottie (Joan Hackett, pictured below) quietens and stills as she offers her virginity to Richard Mulligan’s blunt bohemian is one of many small, perfect moments from a fine, now half-forgotten female cast. The blood-smeared hand she inspects in the bathroom afterwards joins contraception, spousal violence, lesbianism and the rigours of flat-chested breast-feeding amongst the frankly handled feminine themes.

Thirties fashion and interior design is precise, but Boris Kaufman’s elegantly roaming camera and equally sharp script and editing make this feel like a contemporary film about women alive in their time, set in neither 1936 nor 1966 aspic. War clouds are looming, and concerned types such as Hal Holbrook’s literary editor put their faith in Communism and the psychiatrist’s couch. Larry Hagman’s alcoholic louse of a husband and the fierce delusion of Kay (Joanna Pettet) that their marriage must succeed is, though, a timeless tragedy.

Lumet’s close attention to his actresses’ vividly truthful faces is its own reward. This is a bare-bones, extras-free release, but a valuable one.