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
