Splendor in the Grass (Newtown Productions, NBI Productions, Warner Bros., 1961)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, September 1) at 9 I noticed a film on the Turner Classic Movies schedule I’d long been at least mildly curious about: Splendor in the Grass, a 1961 romantic melodrama directed by Elia Kazan from a more or less “original” screenplay by William Inge. I put “original” in quotes because Inge wrote it first as a novel (not a play, though he was primarily a stage writer) and then as a script, though since he apparently never published the novel (at least not until after the movie was made), the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences counted it as an “original” rather than an “adapted” screenplay and gave Inge an Academy Award. Splendor in the Grass got its title from lines in a poem by William Wordsworth called “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” by which Inge was so taken he’d already used another line from it, Glory in the Flower, for a play title:

“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 splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind.”

Set in Inge’s native Kansas starting in 1928, Splendor in the Grass is a tale of two young lovers, grocer’s daughter Wilma Dean “Deanie” Loomis (Natalie Wood) and Bud Stamper (Warren Beatty, in his film debut), along with their monumentally possessive parents. Ace Stamper (Pat Hingle) is founder and CEO of a small oil company he hopes to merge with a larger one in New York, and as part of the deal he wants the combined outfit to give Bud a major job as soon as Bud finishes college at Yale University. He and his wife (Joanna Russ) have pinned all their hopes for the future on Bud since their only other child, an older daughter named Ginny (played by Barbara Loden, the second Mrs. Elia Kazan, in a performance that steals the first half of the film), has turned into a man-crazy nymphomaniac who got pregnant and had to have an abortion. (That’s communicated with the usual circumlocutions forced on screenwriters by the Production Code, which was being ever so slightly liberalized in 1961 but was still very much in overall effect.) Ace is also living his dreams of athletic glory in school vicariously via Bud, who’s captain of the high-school football team; Ace’s athletic career ended when he fell off an oil derrick and survived but was left with a permanent limp. (Apparently Pat Hingle had a real accident while making the film that left him with a limp, which he used powerfully to add heartbreak and emotion to his character.) Deanie’s parents (Fred Stewart and Audrey Christie) are constantly reading her the riot act about the all-important need to preserve her virginity until she gets married, and when Deanie asks her mom, “Didn’t you ever have these feelings about Dad?,” mom basically says hell, no; she tells her daughter that sex is something she has to endure from her husband so they can have children, certainly not something a woman is supposed to enjoy.

Bud and Deanie have long necking sessions in his car – a Model “A” Ford – that go as far as mutual kissing, but no more because both Bud’s and Deanie’s parents have continually warned their kids that adolescent experimentation can lead to pregnancy and forced marriage, which will only ruin their lives. Indeed, the film’s original poster read, “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.” Bud’s and Deanie’s relationship takes a nose-dive when Bud collapses on the court in the middle of a high-school basketball game; the town doctor, Dr. Judd (Ivor Francis), tells him it’s nothing serious but also gives him the wretched advice that if Deanie won’t “put out” for him, he has to find a girl who will in order to relieve his sexual tension. “That kind of girl” is readily available in Deanie’s classmate Juanita Howard (Jan Norris), who lords it over Deanie that she’s been able to get Bud away from her. Heartbroken, Deanie accepts an invitation to the school dance from Allen “Toots” Tuttle (Gary Lockwood, whose best-known credit is probably as the second astronaut in 2001: A Space Odyssey, who’s murdered in space by the ship’s renegade computer). Only during a break in the dance she corners Bud and literally throws herself at him – but this time Bud refuses her, and in despair she goes back to Toots, who tries to rape her. This freaks out Deanie, who heads for a rocky waterfall and tries to kill herself. She’s rescued but her parents sell their stock in the Stampers’ oil company to fund her treatment in a mental institution – thereby fortuitously avoiding losing their potential wealth when the stock market crash happens in 1929. (As soon as William Inge established that the story began in 1928 and involved a stock holding that kept going up in value, we just knew he was going to bring in the Depression as a deus ex machina.)

Meanwhile, Bud yields to his dad’s desire that he attend Yale, but he bombs out because he couldn’t be less interested in his classwork. He finds solace in a New Haven pizza parlor, where he can drink all the beer he can pay for (never mind that this was still during the Prohibition era) and enjoy an exotic new food he’d never experienced in Kansas. Dad comes to Yale to see if he can talk the college dean out of flunking Bud out, but then the Depression happens and Ace Stamper goes broke overnight and ultimately jumps out of a window, killing himself. I don’t know whether Inge intended this to parallel the high-school accident that cost him an athletic career, but it’s one more trauma Bud didn’t need when he has to identify Ace’s body for the New York authorities. Eventually Bud returns to Kansas with Angelina (Zohra Lampert), daughter of the New Haven pizza shop owner, whom he started dating and ultimately married. The two settle on the ranch Ace ran before he struck oil, and they have a son together with another child – a daughter, Angelina hopes – on the way. Deanie becomes engaged to John Masterson (Charles Robinson), who freaked out because his father, a prominent surgeon, wanted him to become a surgeon too. After a long stretch in the mental hospital in which he smashes metal objects pretending they’re his dad, John is somehow cured and agrees to return to his home town, Cincinnati, and take up a medical practice. The film ends with Deanie going to see Bud at the ranch, only once she realizes he’s married she decides to go through with her marriage to John; the two agree that they can’t have the transcendent happiness they were hoping for as high-school kids but they can have a relative degree of comfort and fulfillment. The film has no end title, which is standard practice now but was highly unusual in 1961.

Splendor in the Grass got mixed reviews when it was new, with the critics who liked it praising its relative sexual sophistication and the critics who didn’t saying it wasn’t sophisticated enough. Dwight Macdonald dissed it big-time in an article called “Kazanistan, Ingeland and Williams, Tennessee,” calling Kazan “as vulgar a director as has come along since Cecil B. De Mille.” The overall thesis of his article was that writers and directors like Kazan, Inge and Tennessee Williams posed as realists but really weren’t; they made their characters behave in ways flagrantly unlike actual people and then claimed they were laying bare the cold, hard truths about human existence. Writing about Splendor in the Grass in particular, Macdonald said, “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.” On the other hand, Natalie Wood loved making the film; years later she told a biographer that she’d had to sign a long-term contract with Warner Bros. to land the female lead in Rebel Without a Cause, and Splendor in the Grass was the first film since Rebel six years earlier that really gave her a solid acting challenge that inspired her instead of the usual sludge. Also, though Warner Bros. had originally wanted Kazan to use Troy Donahue for the male lead, Kazan and Inge insisted on Warren Beatty, whom they’d seen on Broadway in another Inge play, A Loss of Roses. Inge called Beatty “smoldering,” an adjective he’d previously used for Marlon Brando and James Dean – both of whom had become stars under Kazan’s direction, Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire and Dean in East of Eden.

Watching Splendor in the Grass for the first time in 2023, it seems to be a movie that practically defines “uneven”; scenes of real dramatic beauty, poignancy and power (like the one in which Natalie Wood’s Deanie endures her mother’s cross-examination to determine whether she’s still a virgin after she comes home from the dance) alternate with highly contrived ones that blow to smithereens Inge’s and Kazan’s carefully constructed veneer of realism. And the sexual attitudes Macdonald ridiculed about the film today seem to represent the world the Republican Party wants to take us back to, in which abortion and contraception are illegal, so teenagers are deterred by the threat of unwanted pregnancy to avoid sex altogether (which doesn’t work; so-called “red states” consistently have higher rates of teen pregnancy than their “blue” counterparts, at least partly because they’ve so dumbed down what little sex education they ever offered that a lot of high-schoolers have no idea that sex can lead to pregnancy). One qualm I have with Splendor in the Grass is the musical score by David Amram, normally a favorite of mine: a mad eclectic who wanted to break down the barriers between classical, jazz and rock, who in the early 1970’s recorded a double album called No More Walls. My problem with Amram’s score is too much of it sounds woefully anachronistic for a film supposedly set in the late 1920’s. The band at the high-school dance is playing out-and-out Dixieland instead of the Paul Whiteman-esque dance-pop one would have heard at a high-school dance in Kansas in 1928, and when Toots attempts to rape Deanie Amram scores the scene with a 1940’s-style honking rhythm-and-blues tenor sax solo. Later in the film, the scenes set in New York just before Ace Stamper’s suicide are scored with 1950’s-style “cool school” white modern jazz. The musical confusion in Splendor in the Grass mirrors its moral confusion, the consciousness of Kazan, Inge and everyone else involved that they could push the envelope only so far and no farther without having the Production Code Administration and moralistic critics on their backs – even though Kazan filmed the entire movie at Filmways Studios in New York to get as far away from Hollywood and its conventions as possible. They even dared an ending that does not reunite the two young lovers, unlike Hollywood cliché and, at least in that particular, more like real life.