Splendor in the Grass
Splendor in the Grass | |
---|---|
A.S.C. | |
Edited by | Gene Milford |
Music by | David Amram |
Production companies | Newtown Productions NBI Company |
Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
Release date |
|
Running time | 124 minutes |
Language | English |
Box office | $4 million (US / Canada)[1] or $5.5 million[2] |
Splendor in the Grass is a 1961 American period drama film produced and directed by Elia Kazan, from a screenplay written by William Inge. It stars Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty (in his film debut) as two high school sweethearts, navigating feelings of sexual repression, love, and heartbreak. Pat Hingle, Audrey Christie, Barbara Loden, Zohra Lampert, and Joanna Roos are featured in supporting roles.
Splendor in the Grass was released theatrically on October 10, 1961, by Warner Bros. to critical and commercial success, grossing $4 million, and received two nominations at the 34th Academy Awards for Best Actress (for Wood) and Best Original Screenplay, winning the latter.
Plot
In 1928 Kansas, teenagers Wilma Dean "Deanie" Loomis and her boyfriend, Bud Stamper, want a more physically intimate relationship, but heed the advice of their parents not to become more involved for the sake of Deanie's reputation and Bud's future plans for college. Bud's sister, Ginny, a flapper, is more worldly, having returned from Chicago after an annulment and rumors of an abortion to the disappointment and shame of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Ace Stamper. Soon, Bud rescues Ginny from an attempted rape at a New Year's Eve party, but disturbed by what he has seen, tells Deanie they should stop fooling around, and they break up.
Bud has a liaison with a friend, Juanita. Shortly afterward, Deanie explodes in anger when her mother asks if she is still a virgin. Allen "Toots" Tuttle takes Deanie to a school dance where she sees Bud, and tries to entice him into having sex. Bud rebuffs her and Deanie runs back to Toots, who drives her to a private spot. While there, Deanie realizes that she can't go through with sex, at which point she is almost raped. Escaping from Toots and driven close to madness, she attempts suicide by jumping in the pond, but is rescued just before reaching the waterfalls. Her parents sell their oil stock to pay for her institutionalization, and fortuitously turn a profit prior to the Crash of 1929 that leads to the Great Depression.
While Deanie is in the institution, she meets patient Johnny Masterson, who has anger issues targeted at his parents, who want him to be a surgeon. The two form a bond. Meanwhile, Bud is sent to
Deanie returns from the asylum after two years and six months, "almost to the day". Ace's widow has gone to live with relatives, and Bud's sister has died in a car crash. Deanie's mother wants to shield her from any potential anguish from meeting Bud, so she pretends to not know where he is. When Deanie's friends from high school come over, her mother gets them to agree to feign ignorance on Bud's whereabouts. However, Deanie's father refuses to coddle his daughter and tells her that Bud has taken up ranching and lives on the old family farm. Her friends drive Deanie to meet Bud at an old farmhouse. He is dressed in plain clothes and married to Angelina; they have an infant son named Bud Jr. and another child on the way. Deanie lets Bud know she is going to marry John (who is now a doctor in Cincinnati). During their brief reunion, Deanie and Bud realize that both must accept what life has thrown at them. Bud says, "What's the point? You gotta take what comes." They each relate that they "don't think about happiness very much anymore."[3]
As Deanie leaves with her friends, Bud only seems partially satisfied by the direction his life has taken. After the others are gone, he reassures Angelina, who has realized that Deanie was once the love of his life.[3] Driving away, Deanie's friends ask her if she is still in love with Bud. She does not answer them, but her voice is heard reciting four lines from Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality":
- "Though nothing can bring back the hour
- Of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower
- We will grieve not; rather find
- Strength in what remains behind."
Cast
- Natalie Wood as Wilma Dean "Deanie" Loomis
- Pat Hingle as Ace Stamper
- Audrey Christie as Mrs. Loomis
- Barbara Loden as Virginia "Ginny" Stamper
- Zohra Lampert as Angelina
- Warren Beatty as Bud Stamper
- Fred Stewart as Del Loomis
- Joanna Roos as Mrs. Stamper
- John McGovern as Doc Smiley
- Jan Norris as Juanita Howard
- Martine Bartlett as Miss Metcalf
- Gary Lockwood as Allen "Toots" Tuttle
- Sandy Dennis as Kay
- Crystal Fieldas Hazel
- Marla Adams as June
- Lynn Loring as Carolyn
- Phyllis Diller as Texas Guinan
- Sean Garrison as Glenn
- Charles Robinson as Johnny Masterson (uncredited)
Production
Filmed in New York City at
The film's title is taken from a line of William Wordsworth's poem "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood":
- What though the radiance which was once so bright
- Be now for ever taken from my sight,
- Though nothing can bring back the hour
- Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
- We will grieve not, rather find
- Strength in what remains behind...
Two years before writing the screenplay for the film, Inge wrote Glory in the Flower (1953), a stage play whose title comes from the same line of the
Scenes of Kansas and the Loomis home were shot in the
Warren Beatty, while having appeared on television (most notably in a recurring role on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis), made his screen debut in this film. He had met Inge the year before while appearing in Inge's play A Loss of Roses on Broadway.[6]
Inge also made his screen debut in the film,[7] as did Sandy Dennis who appeared in a small role as a classmate of Deanie.[6] Marla Adams and Phyllis Diller were others who made their first appearances in this film.[6] Diller's role was based on Texas Guinan, a famous actress and restaurateur, who owned the famous 300 Club in New York City in the 20s.
Reception
Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called the film a "frank and ferocious social drama that makes the eyes pop and the modest cheek burn"; he had comments on several of the performances:[8]
- Pat Hingle "gives a bruising performance as the oil-wealthy father of the boy, pushing and pounding and preaching, knocking the heart out of the lad"
- Audrey Christie is "relentlessly engulfing as the sticky-sweet mother of the girl"
- Warren Beatty is a "surprising newcomer" and an "amiable, decent, sturdy lad whose emotional exhaustion and defeat are the deep pathos in the film"
- Natalie Wood has a "beauty and radiance that carry her through a role of violent passions and depressions with unsullied purity and strength. There is poetry in her performance, and her eyes in the final scene bespeak the moral significance and emotional fulfillment of this film."
Writing in
I've never been in Kansas, but I suspect that parents there even way back in 1928 were not stupid to the point of villainy and that their children were not sexually frustrated to the point of lunacy...Kazan is "forthright" the way a butcher is forthright when he slaps down a steak for the customer's inspection. [He] won't give up anything that can be exploited.[9]
As for the performances, Variety stated that Wood and Beatty "deliver convincing, appealing performances" and Christie and Hingle were "truly exceptional", but also found "something awkward about the picture's mechanical rhythm. There are missing links and blind alleys within the story. Several times it segues abruptly from a climax to a point much later in time at which is encountered revelations and eventualities the auditor cannot take for granted. Too much time is spent focusing attention on characters of minor significance in themselves."[10] Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "The picture does have its theatrical excesses and falls short idealistically in that its morality remains unresolved; nevertheless, it is film-making of the first order and one of the few significant American dramas we have had this year."[11] Richard L. Coe of The Washington Post found "beauty and truth" in the story but thought "the parents' incessant nagging and unlistening ears are not convincing" and that Christie and Hingle's characters "could do all that they do in far less footage."[12] Harrison's Reports awarded a grade of "Very Good" and wrote that the adult themes "do not blow up the story into a soap-opera bubble. The emotional cheapness and the sordid crudeness that are evidencing themselves in so many of the yarns being spun, these days, out of the sexual pattern of young, immoral behavior is not to be found here. Instead, you find a poignantly appealing and warmly touching performance of lovely Natalie Wood that gives the story meaning."[13] Brendan Gill of The New Yorker disagreed and slammed the film for being "as phony a picture as I can remember seeing," explaining that Inge and Kazan "must know perfectly well that the young people whom they cause to go thrashing about in 'Splendor in the Grass' bear practically no relation to young people in real life ... one has no choice but to suppose that this unwholesome sally into adolescent sexology was devised neither to instruct our minds nor to move our hearts but to arouse a prurient interest and produce a box-office smasheroo. I can't help hoping they have overplayed their hand."[14]
Time magazine said "the script, on the whole, is the weakest element of the picture, but scriptwriter Inge can hardly be blamed for it" because it had been "heavily edited" by Kazan; the unidentified reviewer called the film a "relatively simple story of adolescent love and frustration" that has been "jargoned-up and chaptered-out till it sounds like an angry psychosociological monograph describing the sexual mores of the heartless heartland."[15]
The film holds a score of 74% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 27 reviews.[16]
Awards and nominations
Award | Category | Nominee(s) | Result |
---|---|---|---|
Academy Awards[17] | Best Actress | Natalie Wood | Nominated |
Best Story and Screenplay – Written Directly for the Screen | William Inge | Won | |
British Academy Film Awards[18] | Best Foreign Actress | Natalie Wood | Nominated |
Directors Guild of America Awards[19] | Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures | Elia Kazan | Nominated |
Golden Globe Awards[5] | Best Motion Picture – Drama | Nominated | |
Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama | Warren Beatty | Nominated | |
Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama | Natalie Wood | Nominated | |
Most Promising Newcomer – Male | Warren Beatty | Won | |
Laurel Awards | Top Female Dramatic Performance | Natalie Wood | Nominated |
Photoplay Awards | Gold Medal | Won |
The film ranked No. 50 on Entertainment Weekly's list of the 50 Best High School Movies.[20] In 2002, the American Film Institute ranked Splendor in the Grass number 47 on its list of the Top 100 Greatest Love Stories of All Time.[21]
Remake
Splendor in the Grass was re-made as the 1981 television film Splendor in the Grass with Melissa Gilbert, Cyril O'Reilly, and Michelle Pfeiffer.
In popular culture
The movie's story line and main character inspired a hit song by
In 1973
In True Detective season 2 episode 7 the movie is featured and watched.[24]
See also
References
- ^ "All-Time B.O. Champs", Variety, January 3, 1968 p. 25. Please note these figures refer to rentals accruing to the distributors.
- ^ "1961 Rentals and Potential". Variety. January 10, 1961. p. 13.
- ^ a b "filmsite – Splendor in the Grass".
- ^ "TRAVIS, Staten Island". Forgotten New York. March 11, 2006.
- ^ a b c "Splendor in the Grass (1961)". Movies & TV Dept. The New York Times. 2013. Archived from the original on November 1, 2013. Retrieved February 15, 2018.
- ^ a b c "Filmreference.com".
- Archive.org.
- ^ Crowther, Bosley (October 11, 1961). "'Splendor in the Grass' Is at 2 Theatres". The New York Times: 53. Retrieved April 13, 2019.
- ^ Macdonald, Dwight. On Movies. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969. pp. 141–142.
- ^ "Film Reviews: Splendor In The Grass". Variety. August 30, 1961. 6.
- ^ Scheuer, Philip K. (October 12, 1961). "'Splendor in Grass' Dilemma of Youth". Los Angeles Times. Part III, p. 11.
- ^ Coe, Richard L. (October 14, 1961). "Lush Grows Inge's 'Grass'". The Washington Post. A17.
- ^ "'Splendor in the Grass' film review". Harrison's Reports. September 2, 1961. p. 138.
- ^ Gill, Brendan (October 14, 1961). "The Current Cinema". The New Yorker. 176.
- ^ "Cinema: Love in Kazansas". Time. October 13, 1961. Archived from the original on February 4, 2013. Retrieved July 20, 2011.
- ^ "Splendor in the Grass". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved January 26, 2024.
- ^ "34th Academy Awards". Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
- ^ "BAFTA Awards".
- ^ "14th Annual DGA Awards".
- ^ "50 Best High School Movies". www.filmsite.org.
- ^ "AFI listing". www.afi.com.
- ^ "Hey Deanie by Shaun Cassidy Songfacts". Songfacts.com. Retrieved February 21, 2012.
- ISBN 0-89820-089-X
- ^ "True Detective Season Two: Everyone's Fired". The Atlantic.