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.

On the Waterfront (1954)

USA, 108 minutes
Director: Elia Kazan
Writers: Budd Schulberg, Malcolm Johnson, Robert Siodmak
Photography: Boris Kaufman
Music: Leonard Bernstein
Editor: Gene Milford
Cast: Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Lee J. Cobb, Rod Steiger, Karl Malden, Pat Henning, John F. Hamilton, Martin Balsam, Fred Gwynne

On the Waterfront attacks with a jazzy midcentury Leonard Bernstein score, folks working on raising pigeons on tenement roofs, and black and white Method acting draped all over it like sheets over furniture. In many ways it's a perfect picture of American postwar '50s, ripened out of innocence into the knowledge of corruption, with great power. The dockside labor unions of New York are so rife with organized crime it's merely a given. Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) is a boxer who once showed promise, but now he's pushing 30 and on the way to becoming a bum, living the easy life as a mascot for the dockside Mob run by Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) and Malloy's older brother Charley "the Gent" (Rod Steiger). Edie ("introducing Eva Marie Saint") is the sister of Joey, a friend of Malloy's (fellow pigeon keeper) who Malloy inadvertently set up to be murdered. Father Barry (Karl Malden) counsels love and righteous wrath, smokes cigarettes, drinks beer, and tries to talk sense to these people. He's a sincere man of God but it goes about the way you'd expect.

Something feels so churningly ancient in this story, or biblical—it's so bare-faced and focused on raising the dramatic stakes to the sky. In summary, it's something like the redemption of the love for a good woman in the context of divided loyalties between brothers, seasoned to taste with good and evil. On the Waterfront sees director Elia Kazan at the peak of his powers—the very next year he would amplify these themes of Cain and Abel, mixing them in with tones of Babylon and Oedipus and Freud, in East of Eden. But as good as that is, On the Waterfront is the better picture. It's less about the self-pity of its main player, and more about a universal plight in a world that is not merely uncaring but actively hostile. Terry Malloy thinks he can stand to the side of a social world breaking down around him but he finds out that he can't.

Baby Doll (1956)

USA, 114 minutes
Director: Elia Kazan
Writer: Tennessee Williams
Photography: Boris Kaufman
Music: Kenyon Hopkins
Editor: Gene Milford
Cast: Karl Malden, Carroll Baker, Eli Wallach, Mildred Dunnock, Lonny Chapman

Director Elia Kazan made Baby Doll right after two of his most famous movies, On the Waterfront and East of Eden, and right before another interesting curiosity, A Face in the Crowd, which uses a monster Andy Griffith as a certain type of charismatic Southern authoritarian politician (think Donald Trump in good old boy drag). In some ways the success of those earlier movies appears to have opened a vein of experimentation for Kazan. Baby Doll is also the first of only a few original screenplays by Tennessee Williams, who mostly stuck to the theater, though by 1956 he had adapted a few of his own plays for the screen, including The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and The Rose Tattoo. For the most part the air of alcoholism and hysterical tones of Williams's work—all that unsympathetic Southern gallantry and desperation—usually loses me quickly. I know they're still working out the trauma of losing a war to defend slavery down there, hence the Confederate flags, statuary, etc., but already it's almost a hundred years here (and now it's more like 150 and they're still not over it).

Even so, something about this nifty collaboration with Kazan has kept me coming back for more. Probably, yeah, the raw charge of sexuality is part of it, a shot across the bow of the coming sexual liberation, written by a gay man. It's a strange and compelling movie, with one of Eli Wallach's greatest performances, which is saying a lot, especially given that this is his feature debut in a long and illustrious career.

East of Eden (1955)

USA, 115 minutes
Director: Elia Kazan
Writers: John Steinbeck, Paul Osborn
Photography: Ted D. McCord
Music: Leonard Rosenman
Editor: Owen Marks
Cast: James Dean, Raymond Massey, Jo Van Fleet, Julie Harris, Dick Davalos, Burl Ives, Albert Dekker, Barbara Baxley, Harold Gordon

It's probably not possible to overstate the self-importance of East of Eden. It's less than two hours, with no intermission, but somehow merits an overture, pounding away on Leonard Rosenman's swelling theme, which appears throughout the picture, including characters randomly humming it. The story makes heavy-handed and obvious references to the Bible, Freud, and Marx, occasionally juggling all three at once like a circus clown. And the humor is sparing, if it's there at all. It's also the debut of James Dean, pushing method acting front and center in this hothouse Oedipal tale of fraught family relations.

Yet it works—another masterpiece by director Elia Kazan and one of the most powerful movies made about all the very many issues it wants to get to, clutching at them furiously like some beast in a bathrobe bursting into Walmart at 5 a.m. for the sale: sin, redemption, father love, mother love, brother love, capital, labor relations, war and profiteering, immigration tension (against German-Americans, as this is set in World War I times), greed, honor, lust, and other mortal sins, plus the wages of corrosive bitterness. The real miracle is that it does work.