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
Original release trailer of the film Splendor in the Grass (1961)
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 Yale, where he fails practically all his courses but meets Angelina, the daughter of Italian immigrants who run a local restaurant in New Haven. In October 1929, Bud's father Ace travels to New Haven in an attempt to persuade the dean not to expel Bud from school. Bud tells the dean he only aspires to own a ranch. The stock market crashes while Ace is in New Haven, and he loses almost everything. He takes Bud to New York for a weekend, including to a cabaret nightclub, and has a prostitute sent to Bud's room, who he rebuffs. Ace commits suicide by jumping from a building – something he was joking about a short time earlier – and sadly, Bud must identify his body.
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":
Filmed in New York City at Filmways Studios, Splendor in the Grass 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.
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 Wordsworth poem. 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.
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 Esquire magazine, however, Dwight Macdonald confirmed the notion that Elia Kazan was "as vulgar a director as has come along since Cecil B. De Mille." He further commented:
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 movie's story line and main character inspired a hit song by Shaun Cassidy entitled, "Hey Deanie". It was written by Eric Carmen, who also later recorded the song.[22] Cassidy's rendition reached No. 7 on the US Billboard Hot 100 during the winter of 1978.[23] "Hey Deanie" was the second of two songs directly inspired by the movie, the first being Jackie DeShannon's 1966 song, "Splendor in the Grass".
In 1973 Judy Blume published a young adult novel entitled Deenie. The first few lines of the book have the central character introduce herself and explain that shortly before she was born her mother saw a movie about a beautiful girl named Wilmadeene whom everybody called Deenie for short, and that the first time that she held her baby daughter she knew the baby would turn out beautiful and so named her Deenie too. Blume's Deenie goes on to explain that it took her almost 13 years to find out that the girl in the movie went crazy and "ended up on the funny farm", and that her mother advised her to forget that part of the story.[citation needed]
In True Detective season 2 episode 7 the movie is featured and watched.[24]
Elias Kazantzoglou, known as Elia Kazan, was an American film and theatre director, producer, screenwriter and actor, described by The New York Times as "one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history".
Henry Warren Beatty is an American actor and filmmaker. His career has spanned over six decades, and he has received numerous accolades, including an Academy Award and three Golden Globe Awards. He also received the Irving G. Thalberg Award in 1999, the BAFTA Fellowship in 2002, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2004, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2007, and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2008.
Natalie Wood was an American actress who began her career in film as a child and successfully transitioned to young adult roles.
William Motter Inge was an American playwright and novelist, whose works typically feature solitary protagonists encumbered with strained sexual relations. In the early 1950s he had a string of memorable Broadway productions, including Picnic, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize. With his portraits of small-town life and settings rooted in the American heartland, Inge became known as the "Playwright of the Midwest".
Martin Patterson Hingle was an American character actor who appeared in stage productions and in hundreds of television shows and feature films. His first film was On the Waterfront in 1954. He often played tough authority figures. Hingle was a close friend of Clint Eastwood and appeared in the Eastwood films Hang 'Em High, The Gauntlet, and Sudden Impact. He also portrayed Jim Gordon in the Batman film franchise from 1989 to 1997.
Sandra Dale Dennis was an American actress. She made her film debut in the drama Splendor in the Grass (1961). For her performance in the comedy-drama film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), she received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Loomis may refer to:
Zohra Lampert is an American actress, who has had roles on stage, film and television. She performed under her then-married name of Zohra Alton early in her career.
Deenie is a 1973 young adult novel written by Judy Blume.
Fahrenheit 451 is a 1966 British dystopian drama film directed by François Truffaut and starring Julie Christie, Oskar Werner, and Cyril Cusack. Based on the 1953 novel of the same name by Ray Bradbury, the film takes place in a controlled society in an oppressive future, in which the government sends out firemen to destroy all literature to prevent revolution and thinking. This was Truffaut's first colour film and his only non French-language film. At the 27th Venice International Film Festival, Fahrenheit 451 was nominated for the Golden Lion.
West Side Story is a 1961 American musical romantic drama film directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, written by Ernest Lehman, and produced by Wise. The film is an adaptation of the 1957 Broadway musical of the same title, which in turn was inspired by Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet. It stars Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, Russ Tamblyn, Rita Moreno, and George Chakiris, and was photographed by Daniel L. Fapp in Super Panavision 70. The music was composed by Leonard Bernstein, with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.
Barbara Ann Loden was an American actress and director of film and theater. Richard Brody of The New Yorker described Loden as the "female counterpart to John Cassavetes".
Geoffrey Horne is an American actor, director, and acting coach at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. His film and television credits include The Bridge on the River Kwai, Bonjour Tristesse, The Strange One, Two People, The Twilight Zone, and The Outer Limits.
The 19th Golden Globe Awards, honoring the best in film and television for 1961, were held on March 5, 1962.
Gene Callahan was an American art director as well as set and production designer who contributed to over fifty films and more than a thousand TV episodes. He received nominations for the British Academy Film Award and four Oscars, including two wins.
"Hey Deanie" is a song written by Eric Carmen. It was a popular hit single by Shaun Cassidy that was released the last week of November, 1977 from his album, Born Late. It was his third and final top 10 hit, peaked at number seven for two weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, spending four months on the chart from late 1977 to early 1978. As with Cassidy's prior singles, this song also became a gold record.
Splendor in the Grass is a 1981 American TV movie directed by Richard C. Sarafian. The movie is a remake of the 1961 film of the same name, written by William Inge and starring Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty.
Le Bonheur ("Happiness") is a 1965 French drama film directed by Agnès Varda. The film is associated with the French New Wave and won two awards at the 15th Berlin International Film Festival, including the Jury Grand Prix.
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs is a 1957 play by William Inge about family conflicts during the early 1920s in a small Oklahoma town. It was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play in 1958 and was made into a film of the same name in 1960. It is the most autobiographical of all Inge plays.
The Mystery of Natalie Wood is a two-part 2004 made-for-TV biographical film directed by Peter Bogdanovich. Partly based on the biographies Natasha: the Biography of Natalie Wood written by Suzanne Finstad and Natalie & R.J. written by Warren G. Harris, the film chronicles the life and career of actress Natalie Wood from her early childhood in the 1940s until her death in 1981.
References
↑ "All-Time B.O. Champs", Variety, January 3, 1968 p. 25. Please note these figures refer to rentals accruing to the distributors.
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