SONG:  "A Very Precious Love"

What though the radiance which was once so bright,
be now forever taken from my sight,
though nothing can bring back the hour
of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.

Splendor in the Grass (1961) [NR]

124 minutes; in Color

Genre(s): Roaring '20s, Sex & Sexuality, Teen Angst

Cast: Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty, Audrey Christie, Barbara Loden, Zohra Lampert, Phyllis Diller, Sandy Dennis; DIRECTED BY: Elia Kazan; WRITTEN BY: William Inge; CINEMATOGRAPHY BY: Charles Durnham; MUSIC BY: David Amram.

Awards: Oscars 1961: Story & Screenplay.


Review: A drama set in rural Kansas in 1925, concerning a teenage couple who try to keep their love on a strictly intellectual plane and the sexual and family pressures that tear them apart. After suffering a mental breakdown and being institutionalized, the girl returns years later in order to settle her life. Film debuts of Beatty, Dennis, and Diller. Inge wrote the screenplay specifically with Beatty in mind, after the actor appeared in one of Inge's stage plays. Filmed not in Kansas, but on Staten Island and in upstate New York.

 

 

Splendor in the Grass (1961) is another of director Elia Kazan's dramatic, hyperbolic films with daring and controversial content for its times - sexual repression and neurosis. The intriguing, over-wrought film is a tragic, coming-of-age melodrama from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright William Inge's original screenplay - it was Inge's first story written directly for the screen and he received a nomination (and the film's sole Oscar) for the Best Original Story and Screenplay for his work (one of the film's two Academy Award nominations).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The time period of the plot occurs during the late 1920s and early 30s at the start of the disastrous Depression in a rural, SE Kansas town, coinciding with the intensity of a first love and the devastating consequences of repressed sexuality upon a pair of love-struck teenagers. The film's tagline expressed this theme: "There is a miracle in being young...and a fear." A poster also described the reality of a 'first love' when feelings that are new and somewhat frightening are heightened by a constricting society:

Whether you live in a small town the way they do, or in a city, maybe this is happening to you right now...maybe (if you're older), you remember...when suddenly the kissing isn't a kid's game anymore, suddenly it's wide-eyed, scary and dangerous.

The film's title is taken from English romantic William Wordsworth's 1807 Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Reflections of Early Childhood, some of which is quoted here:

Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower
We will grieve not, but rather find
Strength in what remains behind.

The mood and story line of the stormy relationship between two star-crossed, teenaged lovers parallels the poem as the adolescents meet, fall obsessively in love and become sexually awakened, face repressed sexual attitudes, parental pressures, turmoil, social constraints and class differences, and ultimately break up and are traumatized without consummating their love. The values of the business-oriented civilization - at the time of its greatest crash - coincides with the collapse of their tender romance.

In a quasi-Romeo and Juliet script, Warren Beatty marked his screen debut (after starring in the Broadway play A Loss of Roses), and co-star Natalie Wood received a Best Actress nomination (her second of three career nominations) for one of her finest (if not the best) screen roles. Reportedly, the stars began an off-screen love affair while making this film - a story of unconsummated passion between a rich midwestern boy and a passionate young girl. 

[The irony of Wood's film role here was that her accidental drowning death in 1981, off of her yacht named the Splendour, was pre-figured by the shocking bathtub scene and an attempted suicidal drowning scene at the reservoir.]

Although it was an early 60s film, it followed a number of films from the 50s (some of which were youth exploitation films) that portrayed the problems of youth, such as Picnic (1955) (another filming of a William Inge play), Rebel Without a Cause (1955) (with Natalie Wood), Kazan's own East of Eden (1955), Peyton Place (1957), A Summer Place (1959), and the same year's great musical West Side Story (1961).

After the credits sequence - red lettering on a grayish background, a teenaged boy and girl are seated in the front of an open, yellow roadster convertible after school in the early evening - on a lover's lane a short distance in front of a raging waterfall. The attractive couple are passionately kissing and breathing heavily - their raging hormones are symbolized by the flow of churning water over the falls behind them. The Commerce High School senior sweethearts are beautiful, dark-haired Wilma Dean ("Deanie") Loomis (Natalie Wood, 26 years old) and hunky sports hero Arthur ("Bud") Stamper (Warren Beatty) - he begs her to go further, but she resists expressing her physical needs:

Bud: Deanie, please.. Deanie: Bud, I'm afraid. (They kiss and embrace more.) Don't, Bud.
Bud: Deanie...
Deanie: We mustn't, Bud.

Angry at her, sexually frustrated and slightly humiliated, Bud leaves the car and stands by the waterfall, stating: "I'd better take you home," as she slips on her boyfriend's striped letter sweater.

A title card 1928, SOUTHEAST KANSAS - is superimposed over a plain, wood-frame house (the Loomis residence) and storefront for the family butcher business - Fancy Groceries. Bud pulls the roadster up in front, as Deanie's mother Mrs. Frieda Loomis (Audrey Christie) notices their arrival on the porch and overhears Bud tell Deanie: "We've had enough kissing for tonight." Not wanting to be seen, she stealthily peers at them through the front door window as they can't restrain themselves for a goodbye kiss.

In the dark living room, Deanie's body language exhibits tremendous sexual longing - she leans backward as she strokes her hair and neck. She hugs a pillow as she reclines on a sofa with her legs extended.

Her domineering mother, who forces her daughter to drink a glass of milk, reveals that they are a from a poor family that is struggling financially to afford her education, and there's little possibility that their shares of rising stock in the Stamper oil company may help ("If we sold those stocks, we'd make $15,000 and maybe we can even send you away to college next year. Well, we're not going to sell.") Deanie dreamily places her ear next to a giant shell - listening to the far-away roar of the ocean elsewhere. She stutters her unconvincing excuse for being with Bud: "We were studying together."

Upstairs, as Deanie undresses for bed and hides herself for privacy in the bathroom to brush her teeth, her mother follows her and tries to instill her own sexual fears into her. Her rigid, puritanical mother vows that boys never respect a girl who goes all the way - love-struck Deanie is troubled by her own emerging, raw physical feelings:

Mrs. Loomis: Now Wilma Dean. Bud Stamper could get you into a whole lot of trouble. And you know how I mean. Boys don't respect a girl they can go all the way with. Boys want a nice girl for a wife. (She slightly cracks open the door.) Wilma Dean, you and Bud haven't gone too far already, have you?

Deanie: (from inside) No, mother.
Mrs. Loomis: Tell me the truth, Wilma Dean!
Deanie: (opening the door all the way) No, Mom, we haven't gone too far.
Mrs. Loomis: That's a relief.
Deanie: Mom...is it so terrible to have those feelings about a boy?
Mrs. Loomis: No nice girl does.
Deanie: Doesn't she?
Mrs. Loomis: No, no nice girl.

A prudish Mrs. Loomis asserts that women don't enjoy sex or have sexual urges, and that they dutifully have sex with their husbands only to have children. She was always physically repelled by her husband and men's aggressive tendencies. But a virginal Deanie is already experiencing (and repressing) strong, out-of-control physical drives, although she struggles with wanting to be 'a good girl' and worries about staying pure until marriage. [Her bedroom's decorations - including a brown bear on top of her pillow - project her childlike innocence that's on the verge of breaking traditional bounds.]:

Deanie: But Mom, didn't, didn't you ever - well, I mean, didn't you ever feel that way about Dad? (She hugs and clutches onto her mother in a desperate fashion)
Mrs. Loomis: Your father never laid a hand on me until we were married. And then I-I just gave in because a wife has to. A woman doesn't enjoy those things the way a man does. She just lets her husband come near her in order to have children. (Deanie stands with her back toward her mother.) Deanie, what's troubling you?
Deanie: Oh, nothing, Mom.

After her mother leaves, Deanie throws herself onto her bed, casts away her brown bear in disgust, grabs her pillow, and thrusts her chest into it. Her sexual longings burst forth as she imagines hugging her sweetheart while glancing at Bud's many pictures plastered above her dresser. Deanie caresses each one with a kiss, and then kneels at her bedside to recite the Lord's Prayer. In the Loomis' master bedroom where Mr. Del Loomis (Fred Stewart) snores noisily, Mrs. Loomis excitely tells him that Deanie is "in love" with the Stamper boy: "He'd be the catch of a lifetime, Del!" She is in favor of their romance, but expects marriage before physical affection.

 

 

When Bud arrives home, his limping father Ace Stamper (Pat Hingle) is leading a celebration in the kitchen - hired workhands from the Stamper oil fields are boisterously eating venison and drinking "home brew" beer. The prosperous, self-made millionaire Mr. Stamper has just brought in a new well that is flowing with over a hundred barrels an hour ("Them big Eastern companies - they begin to sit up and take notice of us"). But with aspirations for his son to succeed him and follow in his footsteps, he is concerned that Bud, the captain of the football team, is keeping late hours with "that li'l Loomis girl" when he should be watching his training or looking ambitiously into the future. He overwhelms his son with advice about putting off thoughts of marriage (or not getting his girlfriend pregnant and being forced to marry her) because there are other better prospects in his life - an education at Yale University and a merging with the oil business. Stamper warns about not disappointing him in sports and in other life choices:

You're watchin' yourself with her now, aren't ya, son? You-you're not doin' anything, boy, you're gonna be ashamed of, are ya?...She's a nice kid, son. She's a good-looker. I've known her folks ever since - well, old Del and I were boys together. I got nothin' against 'em, Bud, 'cause they're poor. I'm not a snob or anything like that. The only difference between me and Del is that I got ambition. But if anything was to happen, you'd have to marry her! You'd have to marry her, son! You realize that, don't ya? You get a girl in trouble, boy, and you gotta take the consequences. (They engage in horseplay by punching each other playfully in the arm.) We got a future, boy...The first thing we're gonna do, we're gonna get you an education - the best. Four years at Yale...My company is gonna merge with one of those big Eastern companies. I'm gonna put you in there. I wanna put you in there, boy...I'm linin' up a future for ya, boy...Bud, there is nothing in this world that I wouldn't do for you, boy. There's nothing I wouldn't do if you do right. If you do right, Bud. Now don't disappoint me, son.

As he states that he's "had one disappointment already" [his daughter], his frail, soft-spoken wife Mrs. Stamper (Joanna Roos) enters the room. In his own bedroom, Bud is also frustrated by his father's words as Deanie was. He hurls a soccer ball at the wall and also buries his head under his pillow on his bed.

 

 

The Stamper's "spoiled," willful, "headstrong," 20s flapper daughter Ginny ("Sister" or Virginia) (Barbara Loden), with bleached hair and makeup, has been something of an embarrassing disappointment for the family - at finishing school, she broke all the rules and was expelled; then at a university, she went "hog wild" and flunked all her courses; finally, in a Chicago art school, she got "tied up with some cake-eater that gets her into trouble just so he can marry her" - but Ace had it annulled by his lawyer. Bud's older sister has returned home a failure for the third time, causing Bud's father to pressure him even more into being a successful flag-bearer for the family. Rebellious, Ginny has gained a bad reputation and has no intention of reforming herself in the backward, rural town:

If you think I'm going to stay here in this god-forsaken town and have people laugh at me and gossip about me, you've got another thing coming, 'cause I'll really give them something to gossip about...I hate it here. I'm a freak in this town. Everybody stares at me on the street like I was something out of a carnival...This is the ugliest place in the whole world. Everywhere you look there's an oil well, even on the front lawn.

Mrs. Stamper's comment about her breakfast-deprived children is rich in emotional meaning: "Neither of my children gets any real nourishment."

In the crowded high school hallway of classmates, both Deanie and Bud walk together hand-in-hand - obviously a radiant Deanie is pleased to be admired and possessed by the school's handsome football hero. Chivalrously, he accompanies her to her English class and carries her textbooks for her. She is tardy to her seat and reprimanded by her prim, bespectacled teacher Miss Metcalf (Martine Bartlett). [A student is writing on the chalkboard "still unravished."] Oblivious as her teacher lectures about literature of the Middle Ages and stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Deanie doodles in her notebook, scrawling various versions of "Mrs. Arthur Stamper" and "Bud & Deanie." Girlfriends June (Marla Adams), Carolyn (Lynn Loring), and Kay (Sandy Dennis in her first film appearance) whisper about Bud and who's taking whom to the football game:

Kay: Just because his father's got money...
Carolyn: That's not true, Kay...
June: Bud Stamper isn't stuck on himself at all.

A flapper-styled, not-so-innocent, slutty Juanita Howard (Jan Norris) answers the teacher's question about a characteristic of the Age of Chivalry: "The Knights of the Round Table had a very high regard for women...They looked on women as very pure." Kay snidely utters an aside: "They wouldn't look on her as very pure." Deanie appears dreamy-eyed when Miss Metcalf rhetorically asks whether chivalry is dead: "Well, how about it, girls? Do any of you feel that you are on a pedestal?"

During the school's football game, Bud is thrown out by the referee for unsportsmanlike conduct. In the shower room after the game, Bud (with his face under a steady shower stream) overhears his teammates joke with Alan Tuttle ("Toots") (Gary Lockwood) about taking out the sexually-experienced Juanita. According to him, "Juanita's the only girl in school who knows what it's all about...I never look twice at those other girls anymore. Ya take them out and spend good money on 'em, and they expect you to feel satisfied if they even kiss you good night."

Outside the school gym, Deanie jealously reprimands Bud after he flirts with red-headed Juanita on his way to the car - and he is furious: "I'm not even supposed to know girls like that exist, huh?" When they reach her house, she is still repeatedly apologizing for her possessiveness and they affectionately make up:

Deanie: (with her head on his shoulder) I just can't stand it when you're mad at me...
Bud: I don't know what's the matter with me lately. I'm always losing my temper. You're the only girl in the world for me. Don't you know that, Deanie?
Deanie: I want to be.
Bud: If it weren't for you...if it weren't for you, Deanie - I don't know. (He smashes a fist into his hand)
Deanie: (She caresses his cheek gently and kisses him. He kisses her back and pulls her toward him.) Oh, Bud, Bud, it's broad daylight. Stop it. Stop it. Come on now. Bud! People can see us.
Bud: I don't care!

They enter the empty house and check to insure their privacy in the parlor. Being head-over-heels in love with him, Deanie begins to show her sacrificial devotion after he has shown interest in someone else. She peppers him with kisses all over his face - and then when they hear voices, they retreat into the side dining room. Through a framed doorway, the camera eavesdrops on their overheated love scene. Deanie presses her groin into his as they lean against a door. Bud forcefully grabs her shoulders and presses her down to her knees to make her confess her utter obedience to his will:

Bud: You're nuts about me, aren't you? You're nuts about me....(After making out a while, he begins to touch her below the waist.)
Deanie: No, Bud...
Bud: (He pushes her down to her knees in front of him.) At my feet, slave.
Deanie: Bud, don't.
Bud: Tell me you love me.
Deanie: Bud, you're hurting me.
Bud: Tell me you can't live without me. Say it.
Deanie: I do.
Bud: You do what?
Deanie: I do love you.
Bud: And you can't live without me...And you'd do anything I'd ever ask you, anything.
Deanie: (fearfully) I-I'd do anything for you.
Bud: Deanie, I didn't mean to hurt you. (She lies on the floor, curled up protectively.) Deanie, Deanie! Deanie, I was just kidding. Look, I'm the one who should go down on his knees to you, Deanie. Deanie, I was just kidding. I thought you knew that.
Deanie: (sincerely) I can't kid about these things. Because I am nuts about you, and I would go down on my knees to worship you if you really wanted me to. Bud, I can't get along without you. And I would do anything you'd ask me to. I would! I would! Anything!

After her confession of complete submission, she rolls over onto her back in a sublime, vulnerable state of passionate surrender, moaning orgasmically and begging for "anything" to happen: "Oh Bud. - Bud! - Bud." When they hear the intrusive Mrs. Loomis returning to the house, Deanie hurriedly straightens herself and they begin playing a regimented duet of Chopsticks on the piano. With lines dripping with sexual innuendo, Deanie is prepared to give into her passions now that Bud has increased his sexual demands and they can't ignore their emotions - the two make plans for an eventful evening:

Deanie: Are we going to the Victory Dance?
Bud: I can think of things I'd rather do.
Deanie: (after warily looking around) I'll be ready.

Once Bud has left and promised to return to pick her up for the dance after dinner, Deanie learns from her mother that Bud's sister Ginny has a bad reputation. She was put "in the family way" by a man in Chicago and had to be taken to a doctor for an abortion - "one of those awful operations." The shrewish Mrs. Loomis strikes fear in her daughter about falling in love: "That's what happens to girls who go wild and boy crazy."

Upon his return home, Bud announces personal decisions to his manipulative father about his career plans, asserting: "It's what I want that counts." His true wishes are to marry Deanie and attend an agricultural college:

Dad, I'm gonna marry Deanie...I don't really want to go to Yale. I'm not a very good student...I'd like to go away to a good agricultural college for a couple of years. I'd really like to do that, Dad. I could come right back here and I could take over your ranch just south of town...I could marry Deanie. I could take her off to college with me. That's what I really want. She'd be a big help to me, Dad.

Mr. Stamper ignores his son's deepest goals, and attempts to convince him to wait about marriage. But Bud, sexually frustrated and unable to postpone his pent-up desires any longer, clenches his teeth in protest. He is advised that there are "two kinds of girls" - and the 'loose' ones are available to sow some wild oats ("get a little steam outa our system"). Adding to the complexity of Bud's confusion is that he feels sexual passion for Deanie - one of the 'good' girls. After realizing he's beaten by his dominating father's hypocritical, morally-corrupt bargain, Bud doesn't follow his own heart - he agrees to go to Yale for four years before marriage:

Mr. Stamper: Son, a boy your age doesn't even know what he wants. After you've had a college education, then you might change your mind...Trust me, trust me this time, son....(rising and moving forward) Son, all I'm asking you to do is to finish Yale. And then if you still want to marry the li'l Loomis girl, you come back here and you marry her, boy, with my blessing. I'll send you both off to Europe for a honeymoon. Bud, please wait, son!
Bud: I just don't know if I can, Dad! I feel like I'm going nuts sometimes.
Mr. Stamper: I understand. (He places his arm over his boy's shoulder.) Your old man understands. What you need for the time being, Bud, is a different kind of girl. When I was a boy, son, there was always two kinds of girls. Us boys - we-we'd never even mention them in the same breath. But every now and then, one of us boys'd sneak off with a girl - and we'd get a little steam outa our system.
Bud: Dad, Dad, no girl looks good to me except Deanie.
Mr. Stamper: I know.
Bud: I love her, Dad!
Mr. Stamper: I know, son, I know!
Bud: See, I don't want to do that. (agonizing) OK. I'll go to Yale. But I want you to know that I'm gonna marry her as soon as I get out.
Mr. Stamper: That's a promise.
Bud: I want you to remember that.

Rain streaks down the windshield of Bud's sportster parked by the waterfall - the couple's faces are blurred by the glass as she vows to be faithful for four long years:

Bud, I'll wait for you. I'll wait for you forever. I'll do anything you want, Bud.

 

 

In the Sunday church service, Reverend Whiteman (uncredited screenwriter William Inge himself) sermonizes: "Lay not up treasures for yourself on earth. Where moth and rust doth corrupt and where thieves do break through and steal. But lay up for yourself treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt and where thieves do not break through and steal. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." 

 

Deanie lovingly reaches for Bud seated next to her, 

while Mr. Stamper, the one most in need of heeding the Biblical words, snoozes.