Love pushes high school sweethearts to the brink in Elia Kazan's powerful 1961 classic Splendor in the Grass. Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty,the most popular students in their school,are so passionately in love that it drives both of them to physical and mental disaster.
William Inge wrote Splendor's Oscar-winning screenplay with Kazan's input. Inge and Kazan gave puritan, Midwestern morality and repressed sexuality a shot right between the eyes with both barrels.
It may sound like pure soap opera, but under Elia Kazan's brilliant guidance William Inge's literate, well-constructed and beautifully written script emerges as one of the best coming-of-age films ever made.
At her most beautiful, 23 year old Natalie Wood is wondrous as she moves fluidly from innocently infatuated to obsessive to resigned.
Her doe-eyed beauty is breathtaking and her performance earned her an Oscar nomination. However, Natalie's on-set, off-set romance with costar, Warren Betty, drove a stake in the heart of her first marriage with Robert Wagner.
As the none-too-bright Bud, Warren Beatty is charismatic in his film debut and makes Deanie's powerful fixation completely understandable. There are several standout performances among the supporting cast with Audrey Christie pitch-perfect as Deanie's unsympathetic mother, Pat Hingle in blowhard mode as Bud's power-hungry father, and Zohra Lampert as Angie, the self-effacing waitress Bud meets at Yale
In the same way he was able to extract a searing performance from Andy Griffith in 1957's A Face in the Crowd, master film director Elia Kazan gets similarly stellar results from Natalie Wood in this classic 1961 melodrama about youthful sexual repression in rural 1920's Kansas.
Pat Hingle is simply superb as Ace Stamper. The bigger than life character nearly dominates the film. Kazan's then-mistress, Barbara Loden, drips sexuality. Even Inge has a cameo as a minister. The entire cast is wonderful.
While the whole film is beautifully executed thanks to Kazan's sure hand and William Inge's screenplay, it's the last fifteen minutes that really resonate with the characters expressing their emotions with a minimum of dialogue. Otherwise, there are plenty of heated moments of melodrama along with soap opera elements familiar to anyone who has seen 1955's Picnic based on Inge's successful Broadway play.
THE PLOT: Deanie Loomis (Natalie Wood) and Bud Stamper (Warren Beatty) are the campus queen and king at their small-town Kansas high school in 1928. Deanie is a beautiful girl and Bud is the school's star athlete. But the couple's relationship becomes increasingly strained as Deanie continuously rebuffs Bud's sexual advances.
Deanie's mother (Audrey Christie) drills into her daughter the importance of being a "good" girl. It is the Roaring 20s, but Deenie's mother believes that sex is for reproduction only and that a good woman has NO sexual desires or longings.
Bud's father, Ace Stamper (Pat Hingle), is the wealthiest man in town and dreams of his son attending Yale and climbing the corporate ladder while Bud's sister, Ginny (Barbara Loden), rebels against her controlling father by becoming the town tramp. Bud wants to please his father, who is so disappointed with his daughter who just want to drink and sleep with other men. Already she has had an abortion and an annullment and she's not happy either so she drinks and sleeps her way out of her troubles.
When Bud dates the school floozy, Juanita, to let off some steam, and sow his wild oats, as his father encouraged him to do, Deanie is crushed and suffers a breakdown. She soon seeks out Bud at a school dance, willing to do "anything" to keep him, but he refuses her uncharacteristic advances. Distraught, Deanie unsuccessfully attempts suicide and is committed to a mental institution for a couple of years.
Ace visits Yale in an attempt to motivate Bud, who is failing every subject, but when his fortune evaporates with the stock market crash of 1929, Ace jumps to his death from a New York City window. Bud drops out of college and returns to Kansas and his family's ranch with his new wife, an Italian waitress who took a shine to him.
When Deanie is released from the sanitarium she returns home and seeks out Bud at his ranch to see if there is any spark left between them although she is engaged to a young man she met while institutionalized. She is surprised to find that Bud is married with an infant and his wife is expecting another. Deanie regrets that her relationship with Bud is over but is determined to carry on.
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