Monthly Archives: June 2015

  • Splendor in the Grass

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Elia Kazan  (1961)

    Bud Stamper (Warren Beatty), scion of a wealthy Kansas ranching family, wants to have sex with his girlfriend Deanie Loomis (Natalie Wood) but Deanie does as her mother tells her to and resists.  Mrs Loomis (Audrey Christie) also explains to her daughter that women don’t much like that kind of thing anyway; that Deanie’s father ‘never laid a finger on me before we were married’; after they were married she simply let him have his way.  Bud, impatient to marry Deanie, would also like to go to agricultural college then follow in his father Ace’s footsteps as a rancher; the father (Pat Hingle) is anxious for Bud, although he’s not a brilliant student, to go to Yale for four years and for marriage to wait until after graduation.  The thwarting of the kids’ desire and hopes for the future is bound to end badly; in due course, Deanie has a nervous breakdown and spends the next two and a half years in a mental institution.  William Inge’s script is, although full of melodramatic incident, covering familiar ground and never surprising.   But the disparity between the tiredness of Inge’s themes and the hysterical intensity of Elia Kazan’s direction – and of some of the performances – make Splendor in the Grass, although it’s bad, rather extraordinary.  The film sometimes seems to be taking place within a deranged mind.

    According to the programme note (an extract from David Thomson’s biography of Warren Beatty), Inge’s screenplay is autobiographical.  That sort of explains the late 1920s setting of the story (Inge was born in 1913) yet this still feels anachronistic.   The material is firmly rooted in the 1950s, the period in which Inge enjoyed most of his success – Come Back Little Sheba, Picnic, Bus Stop.  (His established stature as a writer, especially for the stage, is presumably the reason why Splendor in the Grass won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar – in a year in which the other nominations included La dolce vita!)   The currency of the theme – why can’t the parents just let the kids do what will make them happy? – is reinforced by the fact that Splendor in the Grass was released the same year as the screen version of West Side Story, with Natalie Wood starring in both.  (The ruinous effects on children of their parents were already enough of a cliché to be satirised, in ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’, in the first stage production of West Side Story in 1957.)  The action in Splendor in the Grass begins in 1928 less because William Inge was an adolescent at the time than for a basic, practical reason:  as soon as we get – in the first scene – mention of shares increasing in value, it’s obvious that the next year’s Wall Street Crash is going to be important to the plot.  (The twenties setting also allows references to prohibition and makes Bud’s rebellious elder sister Ginny’s consorting with a bootlegger scandalously topical.)   There’s a momentary but-they-were-fucked-up-in-their-turn exchange between Deanie and her doctor in the asylum but this is a token gesture:  the script has it in for the older generation.  The louder voice in each of the Loomis and Stamper marriages is mired in shrill  vicarious ambition for their children; the subdued niceness of their partners – Mr Loomis (Fred Stewart), who repeatedly advises his daughter to drink plenty of milk, and the sad, mousy Mrs Stamper (Joanna Roos) – makes them all the more feeble.   The script is very bad.  It’s not just that, at least until Deanie goes officially bonkers, every scene seems to be making the same point.  The dialogue is vapid as often as it’s purple (for example in a lame exchange between Bud and his high school teacher about a poor term paper that he’s written).  The plotting is sometimes nonsensical (when Deanie eventually comes home from the mental institution, why would her mother – who’s dead set against her daughter trying to renew contact with Bud – not tell her that he’s married?).

    The bizarreness of Splendor in the Grass is reinforced by the rich confusion of acting styles.  Although Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty were virtually the same age (in fact he was a year older), Beatty’s playing seems decades more modern.  It seems right that Bud eventually marries an Italian-American girl called Angelina because Zohra Lampert, who plays her, is the only other performer who seems to belong to Beatty’s acting generation – she’s freer and emotionally  expressive in a more physical way than everyone but him.  Angelina works in her mother’s eatery in New Haven and Beatty’s very best moment comes in the one scene there.  Hating Yale, he’s got drunk and sits talking to Angelina about Kansas as she offers him pizza:  Bud feels far from home – far enough to be nostalgic about a place which has made his life so unhappy.   Elsewhere, Beatty often has to struggle with the constraints of the material as much as anyone else but, in his cinema debut (the film was released a few weeks before The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone) he’s a very distinctive presence – sensitive but with a core of sanity and a physical robustness that makes him different from the misunderstood young men mythicised by James Dean in East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause.   The final scenes of the film, when Deanie visits Bud on the ranch where he now lives with Angelina and their infant son, are uncharacteristic of Splendor in the Grass but they’re quietly eloquent.  Beatty and Zohra Lampert, skilfully directed, convey the security – and, from Bud’s point of view, disappointment – of married life strongly and economically.  As Sally said, Natalie Wood’s demure resignation at the end of the movie is more persuasive than any of her overacting in all that’s gone before.  As usual, Wood is sexy but knowing; she’s always playing to the camera rather than to her screen partner.   The knowingness blunts her expressiveness yet the sexiness still registers so she seems inadvertently vampish.  When Natalie Wood’s Deanie furiously denies to her mother that she’s a nice girl, you feel she doesn’t need to.

    Nearly all the performers here are striking but in only a few cases is that a compliment.  As Ace Stamper, Pat Hingle is dynamic, to put it mildly, but his avid, I-know-best aggression is unvarying.  Barbara Loden as his misbehaving daughter Ginny is also required to repeat a routine (before the character is carelessly dropped halfway through).   Phyllis Diller is strong in a cameo as a New York club hostess (a real person called Texas Guinan) on the night of the Wall Street Crash – this is a really odd, fervid scene.  Among Bud and Deanie’s contemporaries, Sandy Dennis, with her volatile eccentricity, stands out.   Deanie’s other friends June (Marla Adams) and Hazel (Crystal Field), although supposedly nice normal girls, are actually weirder than most of the inhabitants of the institution Deanie ends her teenage years in, though not as disturbing as one of the nurses there (who’s uncredited).  Elsewhere at the asylum, Kazan seems to want to present the patients as aestheticised images of mental illness.   One of the few actors who leaves an impression after he’s disappeared from view and out of earshot is Inge himself as a seriously disapproving preacher.   When he’s working with something as substantial as Streetcar or On the Waterfront or East of Eden, Elia Kazan manages to be both respectful of the script and imaginative in what he does with it.   With weaker material like this, he’s too anxious to compensate for a deficit in the writing.  He makes each scene so vivid that it seems isolated from all the others.   That sometimes works – in the pizzeria bit, for example – but it gives Splendor in the Grass a disjointed feel, as if it had been heavily cut.  And there’s a fair amount of visual overkill:  the waterfalls in the Kansas landscape overpower rather than get across a sense of the young would-be lovers’ dammed passion.   The title, since it comes from Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, really should have a ‘u’ in ‘splendor’.

    2 June 2012

     

     

     

  • Hud

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Martin Ritt  (1963)

    Excellent when it concentrates on the characters, unfortunately inclined to sermonise, but all in all one of the best, most richly enjoyable American films of the early 1960s.   It’s very interesting to see now – as an early example of two, connected kinds of later film.   Hud decries the materialism and moral bankruptcy of mid-twentieth century America.  This isn’t one of its strengths but, in this respect, Martin Ritt’s movie is a pioneer:  once Vietnam, the Kennedy and King assassinations and the permissive society had taken hold of the American psyche later in the decade, these themes became familiar (and often tiresome).   The film is also one of the first ‘modern Westerns’:  the people live and work in places and jobs familiar from classics Westerns – but there’s a prevailing sense that the best days of the culture are behind it.     Hud is based on a novel by Larry McMurtry, who also wrote the source material for The Last Picture Show and, more than 30 years later, co-wrote the screen adaptation of Brokeback Mountain (the seminal first scenes of which, set in 1963, are contemporary with Hud).

    The piece is essentially a four-hander.  There’s Homer, the elderly, honourable cattle farmer;   Hud, his charming, don’t-give-a-damn son;   Lon, the orphaned son of Hud’s brother, who died in a car crash when Hud was drunk driving;  and Alma, their fortyish housekeeper.  All three generations of the men work on Homer’s farm – the central narrative thread is the discovery of foot-and-mouth and the eventual destruction of Homer’s herd.  The domestic details and description of small town Texas life are fascinating.  Alma’s kitchen, the café, the picture house, the pig-wrestling sequence – these capture the mixture of community, tradition and boredom at the heart of the characters’ lives.   Hud is much less satisfying when the characters, particularly Homer, speechify – telling each other what’s wrong with their approaches to life and with the country.    The writing in these bits is flaccid and obvious – in contrast to the terse, funny vernacular that gives the wary courtship of Alma and Hud a marvellous tension.  The stiff verbal explanations seem redundant anyway, given the visual power of Hud.   James Wong Howe’s framing of the wide, empty landscapes, the ranch, and the placing and lighting of the characters in these settings completely convey the spirit of the place and a sense of people left stranded by the passage of time.

    Melvyn Douglas, as Homer, is physically very impressive – the distinguished, weatherbeaten face and the obstinately upright carriage get across the old man’s intransigent, self-righteous nobility, his narrow-minded high-mindedness.  (As Sally said, No Country For Old Men would be a good name for this film too; it’s a notable coincidence that the McMurtry novel is called Horseman, Pass By – also a phrase from a Yeats poem.)  Douglas gives a fine performance as an unyielding windbag – even though Martin Ritt, the husband-and-wife writing team of Harriet Frank and Irving Ravetch and the actor himself seem to share Homer’s idea of himself as admirably principled.    As a result, Homer quickly becomes tedious – except for the moment when he sings along – full-bloodedly and with an assertiveness in which you sense his fear for the future – with ‘My Darlin’ Clementine’, when he goes to the cinema with Lon.   Brandon deWilde may have been cast in the latter role partly because of the resonance of his having played the child in Shane a decade or so earlier;   anyway, there’s a sadness about his presence here, because of that association, because the actor was dead in 1972 at the age of 30 – and, though it seems unkind to say so, because of the gulf between deWilde’s interpretative skills and those of the other three principals.   Even so, Lon’s earnestness – although it may be the actor’s rather than the character’s – is affecting;  Lon/deWilde somehow doesn’t fit easily into the scheme of things and this creates a sense that Homer, Hud and Alma all feel, in their various ways, bad about not doing enough to help him.

    The film’s most famous scene is the one in which the herd are slaughtered; it is impressive but, because it’s straining for symbolic power, the effect is rather to link the sequence with the less good parts of the dialogue.   What’s unarguably and enduringly brilliant in Hud are the performances of Paul Newman and Patricia Neal.    Newman had an unsurpassed ability to play glamorous blowhards and show you the vulnerability beneath the bravado in an unforced way, in a way that lets you both enjoy the strutting charm and feel the underlying desperation.   An exasperated shrug as he walks away from one of his father’s tirades is not only beautifully expressive – it also deflates Homer’s (and the script’s) rhetoric and humanises the scene.  In the same way, Newman transforms the cliché of Hud’s irresponsibility resulting in the death of his brother by showing – and making you believe – how it’s still eating at Hud.  This gives his cockiness a suppressive edge; and his feelings towards his nephew, for all Hud’s easy banter, are uneasy and unresolved.

    Newman’s likeability, in combination with Martin Ritt’s natural sympathy and skill with actors, saves the film from the pompous condemnation of Hud that the script’s set-up threatens.  Yet Hud’s physical approaches to Alma are still uncomfortable; and, when he tries to rape her, it’s actually more troubling because it’s Paul Newman.   The ambiguities in this sequence are compelling – not least because Patricia Neal doesn’t allow you to forget, even when threatened with sexual violence by him, of how strongly Alma is attracted to Hud.   Neal’s acting is an extraordinary example of letting the audience see a character’s feelings even though these are hidden to the other characters.  Hud goes out for the evening, Homer talks with Lon about the ways of women, Alma silently does the dishes – and holds the screen.  When Hud come on strong to her, and she flirts with him, Alma – used, sexy and witty all at the same time – is clearly insisting that her head rule her heart:  Neal creates a wonderful, dizzy rhythm as Alma keeps spinning towards Hud then reels herself back.   The performance is unshowy and doesn’t occupy much screen time; it’s remarkable that, in one of the Academy’s finer hours, she won the Best Actress Oscar.   The film also won Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor (Douglas) and Best Cinematography (black-and-white – but definitely not monochrome).   The rapidly melancholy and sparingly used music is by Elmer Bernstein.

    31 October 2008

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