Splendor in the Grass

This article is about the 1961 film. For the Australian music festival, see Splendour in the Grass. For the Pink Martini album, see Splendor in the Grass (album). For the TV film, see Splendor in the Grass (1981 film).
Splendor in the Grass

Theatrical release poster by Bill Gold
Directed by Elia Kazan
Produced by Elia Kazan
Written by William Inge
Starring Natalie Wood
Warren Beatty
Pat Hingle
Music by David Amram
Cinematography Boris Kaufman
Edited by Gene Milford
Production
company
NBI Productions
Newton Productions
Distributed by Warner Bros.
Release dates
  • October 10, 1961 (1961-10-10)
Running time
 124 minutes
Language English
Box office $4 million (US/ Canada)[1]

Splendor in the Grass is a 1961 Technicolor romantic drama film that tells a story of a teenage girl navigating her feelings of sexual repression, love, and heartbreak. Written by William Inge, who appears briefly as a Protestant clergyman and won an Oscar for his screenplay, the film was directed by Elia Kazan and features a score by jazz composer David Amram.

Plot

Kansas, 1928: Wilma Dean "Deanie" Loomis (Natalie Wood) is a teenage girl who follows her mother's advice to resist her desire for sex with her boyfriend, Bud Stamper (Warren Beatty), the son of one of the most prosperous families in town. In turn, Bud reluctantly follows the advice of his father, Ace (Pat Hingle), who suggests that he find another kind of girl with whom to satisfy his desires. Bud's parents are ashamed of his older sister, Ginny (Barbara Loden), a flapper and party girl who is sexually promiscuous, smokes, drinks, and has recently been brought back from Chicago, where her parents had a marriage annulled to someone who married her solely for her money. Rumors in town, however, have been swirling that the real reason was that she had an abortion. Being so disappointed in their daughter, Bud's parents "pin all their hopes" on Bud, pressuring him to attend Yale University. The emotional pressure is too much for Bud, who suffers a physical breakdown and nearly dies from pneumonia.

Bud knows one of the girls in high school, Juanita (Jan Norris) who is willing to become sexually involved with him, and he has a liaison with her. A short while later, depressed because of Bud ending their relationship, Deanie acts out by modeling herself after Bud's sister, Ginny. At a party she attends with another boy from high school, "Toots" Tuttle (Gary Lockwood), Deanie goes outside with Bud and makes a play for him. When she is rebuffed by Bud, who is shocked, since he always thought of her as a "good girl," she turns back to "Toots," who drives her out to a private parking spot by a pond that streams into a waterfall. 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 to commit suicide by jumping in the pond, being rescued just before swimming over the falls. Her parents sell their stock to pay for her institutionalization, which actually turns out to be a blessing in disguise, since they make a nice profit prior to the Crash of '29 that leads to the Great Depression.

While Deanie is in the institution, she meets another patient, Johnny Masterson (Charles Robinson), who is working out anger issues targeted at his parents, who want him to be a surgeon. The two patients form a bond. Meanwhile, Bud is sent off to Yale, where he fails practically all his subjects. While at school, he meets Angelina (Zohra Lampert), the daughter of Italian immigrants who run a local restaurant in New Haven. In October 1929, Bud's father travels to New Haven in an attempt to persuade the dean not to expel Bud from school. While Ace is in New Haven, the stock market crashes, and he loses everything. He takes Bud to New York for a weekend, including to a cabaret nightclub, after which he commits suicide. Bud has to identify the body.

Deanie returns home from the asylum after two years and six months, "almost to the day." Ace's widow has gone to live with relatives, while Bud's sister has died in a car crash. Deanie's mother wants to shield her from any potential anguish from meeting Bud and so pretends to not know where he is. When Deanie's high school friends 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 out to meet Bud. He is now married to Angelina, they have an infant son, "Bud Jr.," and Angelina is expecting another child. Deanie lets Bud know that 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, as Bud says, "What's the point? You gotta take what comes." They each relate that they "don't think about happiness very much anymore."[2]

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 Bud's life.[2] Driving away, Deanie's friends ask her if she is still in love with Bud. She realizes that she still loves him warmly, but that they can never recover that blazing love of youth which they once had. She does not answer her friends, but Deanie's voice is heard reciting four lines from a Wordsworth poem:

"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."[2]

Cast

Production

The film is based on people whom screenwriter William Inge knew while growing up in Kansas in the 1920s. He told the story to director Elia Kazan when they were working on a production of Inge's play The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, in 1957. They agreed that it would make a good film and that they wanted to work together on it. Inge wrote it first as a novel, then as a screenplay.

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 a stage play whose title comes from the same line of the Wordsworth poem, Glory in the Flower (1953). The play relates the story of two middle-aged former lovers who meet again briefly at a diner after a long estrangement; they are essentially the same characters as Bud and Deanie, though the names are "Bus" and "Jackie".

Scenes of Kansas and the Loomis home were shot in the Travis section of Staten Island, New York City.[3] Exterior scenes of the high school campus were shot at Horace Mann School in the Bronx. The gothic buildings of the North Campus of The City College of New York stand in for Yale University in New Haven.[4] The scenes at the waterfall were shot in High Falls, New York, summer home of director Kazan.[4]

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 prior year while appearing in Inge's play, A Loss of Roses, on Broadway.[5]

Also making her screen debut in this film, Sandy Dennis appeared in a small role as a classmate of Deanie's.[5] Marla Adams and Phyllis Diller were others who made their first appearance in this film.[5] Diller's role was based on the real life Texas Guinan, a famous actress and restaurateur, who owned the famous "300 Club" in New York City in the 20's.

Reception

Bosley Crowther, in a "Critics' Pick" review, 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:[6]

Time magazine said "the script, on the whole, is the weakest element of the picture, but scriptwriter Inge can hardly be blamed for it" since it had been "heavily edited" by Kazan; he 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."[7]

Awards and accolades

At the 34th Academy Awards, Inge won an Oscar for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay—Written Directly for the Screen; Wood was nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role, but lost to Sophia Loren in Two Women.[8]

Elia Kazan received a nomination for a Director's Guild of America (DGA) but lost to Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise for West Side Story.[9]

The film received three nominations in the 1961 Hollywood Foreign Press Association awards: "Best Picture - Drama", "Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama" for Warren Beatty, and "Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama" for Natalie Wood.[4]

Natalie Wood received a nomination for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award for "Best Foreign Actress".[10]

The film ranked #50 on Entertainment Weekly's list of the 50 Best High School Movies.[11]

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.[12]

Remake

Splendor in the Grass was re-made as a 1981 television film of the same name with Melissa Gilbert, Cyril O'Reilly, and Michelle Pfeiffer.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "All-Time B.O. Champs", Variety, 3 January 1968 p 25. Please note these figures refer to rentals accruing to the distributors.
  2. 1 2 3 "filmsite".
  3. ↑ "Forgotten NY".
  4. 1 2 3 "New York Times".
  5. 1 2 3 "Filmreference.com".
  6. ↑ Crowther, Bosley (October 11, 1961). "Splendor in the Grass". NYT Critics' Pick. The New York Times. Retrieved 2011-07-20.
  7. ↑ "Cinema: Love in Kazansas". Time. October 13, 1961. Retrieved 2011-07-20.
  8. ↑ "34th Academy Awards".
  9. ↑ "14th Annual DGA Awards".
  10. ↑ "BAFTA Awards".
  11. ↑ http://www.filmsite.org/50besthsfilms.html
  12. ↑ "AFI".
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