Man, HBO Max’s departing movies sure had a lot from director Elia Kazan. I’d only really know him for A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront before. Now, I knew he had to have other movies, but I honestly can’t recall ever seeing them before. I’ve probably tripled the number of his movies I’ve seen in the past few weeks.
That doesn’t change the fact he named names and is a highly controversial figure off-screen. Regardless, I got in one more in 1961’s romantic drama Splendor in the Grass.
It’s 1928 in a small Kansas town. Wilma Dean “Deanie” Loomis (Natalie Wood) and Bud Stamper (Warren Beatty in his film debut) are high school sweethearts that are deeply in love with each other. Deanie’s mother is a bit concerned her daughter has lost her virginity to Bud (she hasn’t because she isn’t that kind of girl), but her folks are a somewhat struggling couple as they run the local grocery store. Bud, on the other hand, comes from a wealthy family who made their fortune through oil. Bud is his school’s star football player, and his loud, rambunctious father Ace (Pat Hingle) wants his boy to go to Yale and come back to run the business. Only after that can Bud marry Deanie as far as Ace is concerned. After all, if Bud impregnated Deanie before all that, it could ruin both of their lives, as seen with Bud’s sexually promiscuous sister Ginny (Barbara Loden). Her parents forced her to get an annulment and (rumor has it and the movie only suggests) an abortion. All Bud wants is to run a ranch, but he’s a good boy who does what his father wants just as Deanie does as her parents want. And both of them have their raging hormones. Will they end up together?
Um, no. And that was something of a surprise at first, but this was 1961, so having two teenagers, even if they were played by actors who certainly don’t look like teenagers, engaged in even a suggested sexual relationship with no repercussions was probably not going to to happen. Not if Deanie is supposed to be a “good” girl. True, Bud does take his father’s suggestion to get his rocks off with a local “bad” girl, but he’s still in love with Deanie, and the two go through a rough time over the course of the movie, with their respective fortunes rising and falling, both in terms of health and family finances. The movie actually ends with Bud married to a girl her met at a pizza shop outside Yale with a baby son and doing what he wanted all along with Deanie engaged to a doctor in Cincinnati. Their final meeting has an air of melancholy with the acknowledgement that, regardless of how much they still love each other and do love their new partners, that life and circumstances worked very much against them.
I don’t know that I would call this movie “realistic,” but it does speak a lot of truth about how life can keep people apart no matter how much they want to be together. As a portrait of first love, it’s a good one, with the two teens showing a great deal of obsession with each other. Is it love or hormones? Arguably, it could go either way, and even if they don’t end up together, they do end up in what looks like good personal circumstances, each with a chance to be happy with someone else. Bud’s wife and Deanie’s fiance are both portrayed as good matches for the more mature twentysomethings the two grow into, and even if Bud’s wife has a look of loss when she sees her husband with his ex, he does stop to kiss her as a silent reassurance. There’s an acceptance to what happened between Bud and Deanie, and that may be something of a truth: life throws us curveballs, so it’s up to all of us to make the most of unexpected setbacks, getting what we need out of life even if it isn’t what we think we want at the time.
Grade: A-
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