I have never reacted to a movie quite as I did this one. At almost every moment I was ready to hit the delete button, but I wound up watching the whole two and a half hours. I liked the concept of following a close-knit group of women from the time they graduated from an exclusive girl's college in 1933 to a decade later when the first of the group dies. It took me a while to absorb enough of the personalities of the eight women to distinguish them and, between the women and their lovers and husbands, you never get to know anyone with much more depth than identifying a dominant personality characteristic. The group dynamics have a certain appeal, but without a deeper understanding of any of the characters I could not develop an emotional attachment to any of them. This undercuts the potential power of the final scenes.
There are some memorable performances. Larry Hagman plays Harald Peterson as a J.R. Ewing without any charm - a truly unpleasant person. In fact almost all of the men in this movie are sad examples of the sex. Candice Bergen, as Lakey, creates the the most interesting character, but she gets the least screen time. Robert Emhardt has a grand time playing the manic Mr. Andrews and Hal Holbrook has some good moments as an overly-psychoanalyzed literary editor.
Some of the topics were ahead of the time for 1966. I found Dr. Ridgeley's dismissal of Freud in favor of a more biological approach to mental disorders refreshing. And Lakey was not ostracized for her being a Lesbian - even more interesting if that was indeed an attitude at all current in the 1930s.
However, my overall reaction was ambivalence.
There are some memorable performances. Larry Hagman plays Harald Peterson as a J.R. Ewing without any charm - a truly unpleasant person. In fact almost all of the men in this movie are sad examples of the sex. Candice Bergen, as Lakey, creates the the most interesting character, but she gets the least screen time. Robert Emhardt has a grand time playing the manic Mr. Andrews and Hal Holbrook has some good moments as an overly-psychoanalyzed literary editor.
Some of the topics were ahead of the time for 1966. I found Dr. Ridgeley's dismissal of Freud in favor of a more biological approach to mental disorders refreshing. And Lakey was not ostracized for her being a Lesbian - even more interesting if that was indeed an attitude at all current in the 1930s.
However, my overall reaction was ambivalence.