Fans of Sidney Lumet and screen adaptations of 20th-century literature may want to check out The Group, a relatively faithful film version of Mary McCarthy's seminal post-graduate "campus" novel of the same name. The elliptical and rather familiar plot follows a group of young women-all classmates, friends, and recent graduates from a certain single-sex liberal arts college-as they face the inevitable pressures to sand the rough edges off their personalities and to surrender their independence to the men in their lives and the institutions they represent. Lumet (The Verdict, Dog Day Afternoon) lends to this tale his peculiar sense of lighting, pacing, and rich, captivating color, but he directs with a ponderousness and seriousness that the source material perhaps does not deserve, and certainly cannot comfortably withstand. The wedding-funeral framing device employed here is one we've all encountered before, and Lumet does not afford his young actresses much latitude of expression or interpretation. Particularly stiff (in her first film role, and, boy, does it show) is Candace Bergen; as Lakey Eastlake, the "beautiful one" among the friends, she's asked to provide a moral center for the story, yet her scenes are wooden and rarely develop any dramatic momentum. The lovely Elizabeth Hartman fares better as Priss, an innocent whose blunt sexual initiation still feels harrowing. Amid the gravity of the proceedings, an ensemble cast (which includes, among others, Joan Hackett, Shirley Knight, and Joanna Pettet) strains to replicate the searing wit of McCarthy's prose; and, in several winning scenes, the script preserves some fine examples of her dialogue. Nevertheless, the source novel-by no means War and Peace-doubtlessly would have benefited from a lighter touch. -Miles Bethany.

A landmark title in the evolution of CinemaScope, Bhowani Junction is a fascinating but exasperating instance of a provocative film running head-on into studio interference and censorship. This would be the next-to-last project in George Cukor's long history as an MGM director, and despite its rejection at the time, admirers regard it as one of his most personal achievements. What's irreducibly admirable is Cukor's sensuous embrace of India as both the film's location and its "major character. " With F. A. Young as cinematographer (six years before Young shot David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia), this director chiefly associated with intimate settings and soundstage productions created rich, gold-brown canvases surging powerfully with vast crowds and unrest. Ava Gardner plays a half-British, half-Indian woman trying to find an identity for herself at that moment in 1947 when Great Britain was preparing to withdraw from the country it had ruled for two centuries. Her dilemma is focused through her relationships with several men: a fellow half-caste (Bill Travers) who's been her longtime lover, a slimy British junior officer (Lionel Jeffries), a pure-blood Indian aspiring to make her his bride (Francis Matthews), and the senior British officer (Stewart Granger) whose fierce ambivalence must inevitably mutate into passionate love. If it's sensuousness you're after, you can do a lot worse than having the luscious Gardner at the center of your movie, and the actress responded beautifully to both the exotic setting and Cukor's direction. Alas, Granger was mostly a stick (Cukor wanted Trevor Howard), and the script is awful-structurally incoherent and endlessly recycling bald-faced declarations of the divided-ethnicity theme. [+]