Splendor in the Grass (1961)

USA, 124 minutes

Director: Elia Kazan

Writer: William Inge

Photography: Boris Kaufman

Music: David Amram

Editor: Gene Milford

Cast: Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty, Pat Hingle, Audrey Christie, Barbara Loden, Zohra Lampert, Sandy Dennis, Phyllis Diller, Martine Bartlett, Gary Lockwood, Ivor Francis

Splendor in the Grass is set in the Roaring ‘20s of Kansas USA, in part perhaps so it can use the Wall Street Crash of 1929 as a convenient plot point. Shades of Singin’ in the Rain and Sunset Blvd., looking back from the economic safety of postwar boom times. Really, Splendor almost couldn’t be more of a ‘60s movie, at least that part of the decade that took place before 1967. Less than 10 years after the coming of Playboy magazine, maybe two years after the coming of the birth control pill, the picture is obsessed with sex among coming-of-age youth—desiring it, denying it, getting it, trying to understand it, wondering what it’s all about and what it’s going to be like being grown up. The movie wants to shrug off the mantle of sexual repression, but the burden still weighs it down in 1961. Splendor in the Grass has one foot planted in the arrival of liberated sexuality, exploring the wonders of men discovering women actually enjoy sex, and the other foot planted in the puritan shame of sexuality. Director Elia Kazan is on the psychoanalyzin’ boards again.

It's only an interesting coincidence that the picture pairs a former child star and one-time America’s sweetheart, Natalie Wood (Miracle on 34th Street, Rebel Without a Cause, The Searchers), with “introducing” Warren Beatty, who happens to be so ridiculously young here that he kept reminding me of Tony Dow, the Beaver’s older brother Wally. Living in the future as we do now, we know this aw-shucks captain of the football team routine of Beatty’s is not what we would come to expect from the future lothario by reputation. Shampoo, maybe, is more like it. There is thus an interesting and eerie tension to this strange exercise in managed hysteria, which is worth a look if you don’t mind cringing at things a fair amount.

The values are painfully dated—some as intended and, now, 60 years later, some unintended. Setting it in 1920s Kansas affords a better avenue into the sexual repressions Kazan and screenwriter William Inge want to depict and challenge. “I’d go down on my knees to worship you,” Deanie Loomis (Wood) tells Bud Stamper (Beatty) in all anguished sincerity, and then assumes the blowjob position with Bud leaning against a wall. That is not what Deanie meant at all, of course, at least consciously, but the image is powerful and sexual, as Kazan surely knew. Sexual connotations are dripping from the walls here, the picture is supercharged with the awkward sexuality of teen adolescence. There are lots of make-out scenes and by implication lots of blue balls aftermath.

Inge brings the tone by anchoring the show in a few lines from an 1807 poem by William Wordsworth, as taught in a high school English class: "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." Pompous Miss Metcalf (Martine Bartlett) addresses the class: “Now, what do you think the poet means by these lines?” This turns into one of Wood’s big scenes as she breaks down in class interpreting the poem for Miss Metcalf and for us. Next stop the mental hospital. That’s what young women got even still in the ‘60s for being sexual. Also, mental breakdowns and institutionalization are handy for screenwriters.

I’m not entirely impressed by Wood’s turn to the Method style of acting here—a lot of it seems to me to be overdone. But I appreciate that Kazan gives his players room to expand and even encourages it. His work is often stagy and theatrical, pitched at the highest levels of angst, letting it play to the backrows in the balcony. It suits some of these players better than others. Beatty is a raw talent and blank slate, but the camera is already in love with him. Pat Hingle as Bud’s father Ace, an oilman, is loud and unruly, overpowering most of the scenes he’s in even when it doesn’t exactly fit with the narrative. He is as mesmerizing as I’ve ever seen him. Similarly, Barbara Loden as Bud’s ne’er-do-well older sister Ginny is equally overpowering in many of the scenes that feature her. It feels like Hingle and Loden are clawing at and pushing the shape of this movie. Ginny, a kind of muddled cautionary tale, is a young woman who has given in to her sexuality—she moved to Chicago, got pregnant, and had to get an abortion and move back home. It is hard to see the things that happen to her even in the ostensibly enlightened context of this movie. But Loden is great. Audrey Christie is good as Deanie’s dowdy mother Mrs. Loomis, who is wrong about everything and always makes things worse, a kind of Jane Austen trope, the matriarch as ninny.

A lot of things haven’t dated well in Splendor in the Grass. By today’s standards it’s just obvious, for one thing, that Deanie is suicidal at various crisis points, though ultimately she survives in a surprisingly well done resolution. But it’s textbook. She’s telling everyone in so many words: “I just want to die.” Nobody in the movie gets it and all Kazan gives us is a soulful saxophone solo. Deanie is going bonkers from unfulfilled sexuality and the things that can help her are the things denied her. Hence this drama and a production admirable in many ways. It doesn’t seem like the same drama it might have once because, for example, a lot of people have come to accept the utility of premarital sex and/or masturbation. Problem solved, generally speaking. Like the stock market crash that ruins many of them here, these are problems people bring on themselves.