Esplendor en la hierba

Elia Kazan's wonderful and tearful story about two young lovers fighting their own urges and everyone around them is certainly a film that is hard to watch at times. The simple reason for that is the writing is so spot-on and the direction flawless it becomes more than a movie in the traditional sense but more of a inner look into the intertwining of a relationship on the ends of its life. This can only be accomplished with two wonderful actors capable of carrying the material farther than it could be on paper alone. Natalie Wood was one of the finest young actresses of her generation and this showcases her talent better than perhaps any other film she did. She conveys such incredibly strong feelings of remorse, desperation and sadness as the fragile Deanie, it takes the audience into the world of this character and we can feel nothing but sympathy for her. The same is true with Bud, played here by a very young Warren Beatty.

Perhaps the one true problem I saw with this film is that the story doesn't go far enough. I understand they were already under fire from the censors for their portrayal of young people trying to repress sexual urges, but I'm sure Kazan could have come up with a way to show not just how Bud and Deanie felt about each other but to better examine the relationship with their respective parents. There are several scenes I thought and hoped would go even further in-depth to the problems being faced here, but instead it pulls back and we are left to wonder. If there is one thing that saves the movie it is the final sequence, showing what happens to the two lovers and what this means for them now. This is absolutely touching and beautiful and a great ending to an other wise uncomfortable story.

Still, to think of the film in retrospect is to take it seriously and understand that this is not just a story about two people in love at a time when everybody was telling them to not be. It is in fact, a symbol of the restraints that pull on any of us that have ever been involved seriously with somebody. It speaks to us not just as lovers but also as human beings desiring companionship and the great pains we will go through to make that happen.

So poignant, it hurts. And I'm a heterosexual male who enjoys football and grunge. Though some of the attitudes toward sex have been tempered in the intervening years, the turmoils and pressures of being a teen ring just as true today 42 years after this film's release. Kazan is a master at capturing those wrenching angsty adolescent and post-adolescent moments of emotional vulnerability and doubt, especially concerning the love/hate between children and their parents, and this is among his best work. A reminder that wistful remembrances of the seeming innocence and happiness of youth are probably wishful thinking, and also an ironic prodding that there is seemingly something idealistic lost or compromised when we enter adulthood. Kudos to the entire cast but in particular, Natalie Wood is scintillating, perfectly encapsulating the joys and horrors of someone caught up in the dizzying power and raging hormones of teen love. Beatty is solid, too, if a bit overly earnest.

All of the twists and turns of the plot work, though ultimately Bud's family's economic setbacks and deaths and Didi's family's successes are mere soap operatic window dressing to the "A" plot line, which is the heart tugging reality of "nothing bringing back the hour of the Splendor In The Grass" for Bud and Didi, though both obviously still share the feeling. This is the kind of movie that doesn't get made in America now because of the non-commercial (but accurate) ending. Okay, they broached it in the less psychologically challenging CASTAWAY, but slapped on a happy ending afterwards.

SPLENDOR is not perfect; Bud's father (Pat Hingle) is a little overwrought and stereotypically drawn as the socioeconomic snob with castratingly ambitious designs on Bud's future. Bud's sister (Barbara Loden) is similarly too pat as the troubled, neglected child who does all she can to get daddy's disapproval. Still, any of the soapy aspects of the plot just fall away when the Beatty / Wood romance plot line gets cooking. They got the meat of this movie just right and the result is one of the most memorable and vivid examples of young romance ever set down on celluloid. Don't miss it!

It must have been so easy and tempting to turn this movie into something overblown and melodramatic but the reason why "Splendor in the Grass" works out is because it doesn't fall for any of that and manages to be an original and effective movie within its genre, without actually featuring an original story.

It's fair to say that it's being thanks to Elia Kazan's directing and storytelling technique that this movie works out as something so effective and powerful. He slowly lays everything out and develops the story and all of its characters and their (love) relationships with each other. It makes all of its build up work out, as well as the pay off, at the end of it all. It besides is being a movie that really give all of its actors the room to really shine and tell the story, at times without using any words.

Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty were such a great young screen couple within this movie. You could really feel their love and all of their emotions within this movie. But the movie has many more other great characters and actors in it, such as Pat Hingle, in perhaps his very best role. Such a shame that as an actor he never really received the recognition he deserved because he was a really capable one, who had a wide range as well.

The movie doesn't ever get overblown or sappy, despite of all of its heavy handed subjects in it. I mean, lots of stuff and drama is happening in this movie but yet it really manages to remain a really down to Earth one. Really no matter how unlikely the story ever gets, the movie manages to make everything come across as something realistic. You can feel all of the emotions the characters have to suffer through, which is of course about the biggest compliment you can ever give any drama.

Really a must-see if you're into old fashioned, big, family-drama's.

8/10

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This is a beautiful and powerful film - flawlessly acted, directed and written. It is easily the best of the sexual awakening movies that were so popular in the late fifties, early sixties. And why wouldn't it be - with Kazan at the helm and an original screenplay by William Inge.

The film begins with a similar theme to "Rebel Without a Cause" - that is why won't parents treat their children like human beings and really help them come to terms with becoming adults? But halfway through Inge does a clever turn-around and allows the kids to discover that their parents are human beings too, with all the weaknesses and frailties that go with being human. At the same time Inge portrays the coming of age of America as the joy of the roaring twenties moves into the gloom of the Depression.

The story is about how prejudice and blind morality destroys a great love - sex shouldn't be such a huge issue between two people who love each other, but the enormous pressures from outside to either do it or refrain from doing it cause confusion, pain and hurt. Who will ever forget Natalie Wood leaping naked from a bath screaming at her mother that she is not "spoiled"? Wood gives the performance of her life here, convincingly portraying adolescent love, a nervous breakdown, and the blossoming into woman-hood. Beatty too is splendid as the confused Bud. And both are so achingly beautiful!

The supporting cast is superb down to the smallest role. Barbara Loden is particularly memorable as Beatty's wild flapper sister, but Pat Hingle as his father, and Audrey Christie and Fred Stewart as Wood's parents are also unforgettable.

This is a resonant film that I believe will be more and more appreciated with the passing of time.

This is a fine movie, with a great screenplay by William Inge, director Elia Kazan's ability to convey powerful emotions, and a marvelous performance by Natalie Wood.

Typically relegated to the second ranks among playwrights, Inge deserves more critical respect than he receives. Here, as in "Picnic," he celebrates romantic love, shows how inseparable it is from sex, and portrays the damage done by a conventional world that insists on separating them.

We belittle the small-town characters in the film, who see the world in terms of "good" girls and "bad" girls, but many reviewers have shown a similarly reductionist outlook on a more sophisticated level. They have seen this movie as "Freudian," showing love to be a sublimation of sex. Or they have belittled it as just another "rebellious youth" film of the type that was so popular in the 1950s and early 1960s. Pauline Kael wrote about Natalie Wood's apparently too active "behind," and on TCM, Robert Osborne introduced the movie as one in which the young couple is motivated by "hormones."

In the movie, it is plain that the young couple truly love each other, and it is also plain that they desire each other sexually. So it always will be with young people in love. This is the glory of romance. People frequently love without a sexual involvement, and people frequently have sex without love. But romantic love is a matter of both "body" and "soul" acting as one.