Splendor in the Grass (1961)

Who payed the critics

Sadly Over-hyped

Excellent, a Must See

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Maybe if I'd seen this picture fifty years ago, I would have been impressed. Watching it for the first time last night on TCM is another story. I found it to be seriously dated and hardly representative of the work of director Elia Kazan and writer William Inge. It effectively recreated the time of the late 1920s, but the characterizations of the people are over wrought. More a way of looking at them with 1960 eyes. And today I find them even more unbelievable. I can't fault the performances of the actors, especially Natalie Wood and Pat Hingle, for a reading of what they'd been given. Therein lies the chief problem with the movie. The dialogue is clichéd and uninspiring and the emotions called for are off the wall. And the direction demonstrated no good effort to save the material. It did show a grown up Miss Wood with some acting chops and a promising new actor, Mr. Beaty. I'm glad I got to see it, but sorry about the disappointment.

"Splendor in the Grass" has a very high rating of 7.8 on IMDb and most of the reviews are very positive. Well, this is a case where I am out of step with prevailing opinion and I'd like to explain why. Although the plot was interesting and somewhat like the great French film "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg", the execution of this plot was very problematic to me. Often instead of being reasonable, the actors overact and the director SHOULD have reigned them in...though I am certainly in the minority on this one. The story is about two high school students (Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood) who are desperately in love...but his father wants the son to go off to college and graduate before he considers marrying anyone. But the youngsters are insistent...and eventually the girl inexplicably loses her mind and things DON'T work out as they should.So let's talk about the problems. Beatty and Wood were about 23 each playing 17 year-olds. This was obvious and the parts should have gone to much younger actors. And, the whole going off the deep end because she DIDN'T have sex was truly bizarre--a weird re-working of the rotten film "Sex Madness". In "Sex Madness", premarital sex leads to insanity and here in "Splendor in the Grass" NOT having sex has the same effect!! This is just dumb...as is Wood's overacting when she loses her mind. It was almost laughable. So, despite a lot of great ratings and reviews, I found the film just didn't cut it and seems silly and dated.

A fragile Kansas girl (Natalie Wood)'s love for a handsome young man (Warren Beatty) from the town's most powerful family drives her to heartbreak and madness.Natalie Wood was a great actress, especially in her younger days (she seemed to excel at being a love interest). And the film debut of Warren Beatty? Nice. It is hard to believe he has been acting since 1961 and is still around today (2016), albeit in a diminished capacity.This seems like the essential cliché story about the difference between girls that guys want to date and girls that guys want to marry. I don't know if this is still true (morality has shifted since 1961), but the cliché has not changed.

The amazing thing about each and every film directed by Elia Kazan is what he gets out of his actors to make them perform better than in almost any film by any other director. He must have been the most knowledgeable person instructor ever in films. Here it is worth while concentrating on watching the performance of Natalie Wood especially in the first crisis scenes. There is nothing like it in film history - the extreme sensitivity, the close-up following of her mind, how he lets the camera wander as she gropes her way through a reality that has become her enemy, her questioning looks, her invisible but extreme terror - he catches all this on film, and no wonder she was after this film given the role of Maria in "West Side Story". The film is all hers, he has given it to her almost like a personal offering, while Warren Beatty in his first major appearance is no more than what he is intended to be - almost a helpless dummy. When Natalie gets affected he is at a total loss and can't handle any emotionalism at all, while all he can do is to escape into the arms of another as an abject coward, which is what he does, leaving Natalie stranded in her emotional psychosis, like watching a drowning victim out there in the storm from the shore and doing nothing. His father, on the other hand, is another extremely remarkable performance, he overacts from the beginning and keeps overacting and even worsening it until the end, and he is the real tragedy of the story - like his son, he doesn't understand anything and least of all what is right. It's a simple story about the first love of youths and how it must burn you, it always does, but Elia Kazan's treatment of it turns it into a tremendous heart-breaker. And it's the same with every film by him - he turns his actors into more than just living, burning, and self-consuming people but toweringly passionate, and more alive, convincing and sympathetic persons than if they were real.