After their days at a prestigious Eastern university, eight devoted women friends go their separate ways. Wealthy and very beautiful Lakey, always regarded as their leader, leaves for Europe to begin a new life on her own.
The domestic lives of the others go mainly awry. Priss marries an overbearing, controlling doctor and has two miscarriages before she gives birth to a son. Kay, who was Lakey's pet and was always less sophisticated and wealthy than the other members of the group, marries an abusive playwright who cheats on her. After an unhappy affair with a cold, sarcastic painter, Dottie gives up a flamboyant lifestyle in Greenwich Village to marry a dull Arizona businessman. Pokey has her hands full with two sets of twins. Helena travels the world, but is unable to find happiness at home, while catty and ambitious Libby becomes successful in the literary world despite lacking depth. Polly has an affair with a married man, but later finds real happiness with a kind doctor.
With the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, Lakey then returns home. When the others discover that the woman with her is more than just a traveling companion, they realize that she is a lesbian. After a tragedy that results in the death of Kay in 1940, Lakey joins them at the funeral for one last time together as the group.
The crowd of highly educated, privileged characters on the screen in The Group approached their postgraduate life in the Great Depression as though it was a midterm exam to be aced and filed away, with each milestone treated like a fast course in typing or dancing, another skill acquired, to be trotted out at the next luncheon with the other girls in the group. Full of ideas about a woman's role in the society, but with little real life experience other than in school, the movie chronicles their continued education in the real world.[7]
Bosley Crowther of The New York Times panned it as "a rambling account of the thoroughly banal domestic doings of these eight girl graduates," "so atrociously staged" and "so awkwardly and mawkishly played that it sems[sic] not only a travesty of the nineteen-thirties but an insult to a generation of human beings."[8]Variety wrote that the film is faithful to the novel but retains too much detail.[9]
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