Title: Splendor in The Grass
Release Date: 1961
Nationality and Language: USA, English
Running time: 124 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (by today’s standards)
Distributor and Production Company: Warner Brothers
Director; Writer: Elia Kazan, screenplay by William Inge
Producer:
Cast: Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty
Technical: 35mm
Review:
First, for the reference to the William Wordsworth poem “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” (1888)
“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;”
For full poem, see
http://cla.calpoly.edu/~smarx/courses/253/Splendor/ode.html
Yes, college students, make sure you can identify this passage for your lit. finals.
In my first full semester of college (The George Washington University), spring, 1962, while living at home after the first semester catastrophe at the College of William and Mary, I was taking English 52, “Survey of English Literature,” and the very first assignment was to read this poem and some other Wordsworth. I seem to remember discussion (after one of those notorious card pop quizzes) about poetry giving pleasure. I’ll come back to all this later.
If you want to see a detailed writeup of this film, go to the review by Tim Dirks at http://www.filmsite.org/sple.html
First, for some more perspectives on the film itself. Yes, today, it seems a bit like a soap opera, though better grounded than Days of our Lives. You always have a problem with a movie like this, where the dramatic situation, opportunities and recognition point are exaggerated to keep the audience in its seats and out of the concession lines. That is, the script really does make the sociological point about “family values” for a previous generation. Wilma Dean (Natalie Wood)’s mother lectures her early on, that only nice girls find good husbands, that women don’t enjoy sex the way men do, and that sex is for producing babies. All very pertinent in 2004 when we debate gay marriage. For what comes across so well is that family values is about lineage and blood, about preserving meaning for middle class people socialized by the modern concept of marriage. That includes both a since of shelter within the family for people who need it (kids, and the elderly), and a propagation of class privilege through the family—a bane for the political Left, which correctly points out that such an attitude transmits unearned wealth (“generational wealth” as Apprentice Bill Rancic said) and encourages old institutional practices like segregation. But movies like this tend to be effective when they indulge in a certain hyperbole in presenting an old-fashioned and aging social paradigm.
Okay, this is 1928 Kansas, a poor family, and a Romeo and Juliet setup of two high school sweethearts. (I digress here a moment: Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet is taught often in freshman high school English, and in the opening scenes teachers have to deal with hired lactating nurses, the fact of 13-year-olds dating and marrying [risking the issue of underage sex and even child pornography] and then the whole family values thing about whether marriage is about individual love, or about babies and continuation of family [Mercutio]. Can gay marriage be far behind? Tchaikovsky may have thought so with some prescience when he wrote his famous, passionate overture-tone poem, to end in such hollow triumph—and then there is the Berlioz work, too.) Both high school teenagers [though Stamper looks like a young man already] face parental opposition to their going all the way, and circumstances that make their situation particularly poignant. Now, Bud Stamper (Warren Beatty) is a jock, and Wilma is a poor girl, so there is a bit of sympathy, but not so much respect. (They are not on the level of Clark and Lana from Smallville). Eventually Bud sows his wild oats with another girl, which leads Wilma to a nervous breakdown and stay in a mental hospital, where a doctor tells her it is up to her to change, out of deference to her parents (not just the opinions of “other people.”) Okay, that reminds me of Ephram and Madison on Everwood, and Ephram’s high school essay on his “fatal flaw,” his inability to change.
The film is schmaltzy, especially with its music score, and engaging. The sexual suspense could have been stronger, as it is in later Beatty films (Lilith, 1964). (Although, there is one sequence in particular, where Wilma Dean explores Bud’s neck and throat, and Bud almost goes for the payoff in the next room.) Now I saw it the last Saturday in October, 1961, while at William and Mary (I think it was Oct. 28, Homecoming). My roommate would see a later show the same day, announcing that he as going out to “emote” and then come back to the dorm room in shell shock. For most high school students remember their first love, as an emotionally wrenching affair, a time of idealism (“splendor in the grass, glory in the flower”); adult life, when one settles down and raises a family (if one accepts the challenge – I never did) is much more grounded in aesthetic realism. I had experienced this, in a partially unreciprocated homosexual manner, as a high school senior—but the whole personal life story had provided a new emotional high. I recall an episode of Smallville, season 2, where one of the kryptonite freaks (who steals the youth out of her victims and leaves them with progeria) that you will never be as beautiful and perfect again as you are now. The mental institution episode also is fortelling; seven months after my William and Mary expulsion I would be in one myself (at NIH), as detailed in the link given above. So this movie foreshadows and postshadows a lot for me.
TheWB Smallville Season 3 presented an episode “1961” in which Clark’s extraterrestrial father Jor-El is presented retrospectively, and there is a shot of the movie theater in Smallville with the placard for “Splendor in the Grass” with Natalie Wood. An interesting choice. It would not have shown until late October.
Still, one wonders about Clark’s own academic skills. Would he identify the a quote from the Wordsworth poem on an English test with his photographic memory? I think so. In any event, the quote was on the English 52 final that 1962 spring at GW. But you got to choose any 5 of 7 passages to identify and explain the significance of. But I got this one right and got an A in the course.
That Smallville episode also mentions the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause, in which Natalie Wood plays Judy and the late James Dean plays Jim Stark, the compulsive fighter who draws other people in, like ‘Plato’ Crawford (Sal Mineo), and drags his family along with his reputation. The story doesn’t seem as emotionally seductive to me as the wistful Wordsworth tale above, but the true CinemaScope and WarnerColor are spectacular in this grand old 50s popcorn movie. Dir. Nicholas Ray, 115 min, PG-13 by today’s standards.