Splendor in the Grass

Plot

In Kansas in 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 more 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 time later, depressed because of Bud's ending their relationship, Deanie models herself after Bud's sister Ginny. At a party she attends with Toots Tuttle (Gary Lockwood), another boy from high school, Deanie goes outside with Bud and makes a play for him. When she is rebuffed by Bud, who is shocked because he always thought of her as a "good girl," she turns back to Toots, who drives her to a private 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, because they make a 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 has anger issues targeted at his parents, who want him to be a surgeon. The two patients form a bond. Meanwhile, Bud is sent 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; Bud tells the dean he only aspires to own a ranch. 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, and 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 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. He is now married to Angelina, they have an infant son named 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. Bud says "What's the point? You gotta take what comes." They each relate that they "don't think about happiness very much anymore."

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. Driving away, Deanie's friends ask her if she is still in love with Bud. 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."

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 brightBe now for ever taken from my sight,Though nothing can bring back the hourOf splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;We will grieve not, rather findStrength 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.

Scenes of Kansas and the Loomis home were shot in the Travis section of Staten Island, New York City. 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. The scenes at the waterfall were shot in High Falls, New York, summer home of director Kazan.

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.

Also making her screen debut in this film, Sandy Dennis appeared in a small role as a classmate of Deanie. Marla Adams and Phyllis Diller were others who made their first appearances in this film. 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 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:

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."

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; 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."

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.

Elia Kazan received a nomination for a Director's Guild of America (DGA) award.

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.

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

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

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.

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.