Splendor in the Grass (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Aug 29, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Elia KazanRelease Date(s)
1961 (June 24, 2025)Studio(s)
Newtown Productions/NBI Company/Warner Bros. (Warner Archive Collection)- Film/Program Grade: B-
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: C+
Review
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright William Inge looked back on his memories of growing up in Kansas in the 1920s to write Splendor in the Grass, a screenplay centered on repressed young love. Directed by Elia Kazan, the film stars Natalie Wood in one of her best performances and introduced young Warren Beatty to audiences.
Deanie Loomis (Wood) and Bud Stamper (Beatty) are small-town high school seniors, very much in love with each other. Deanie’s parents are middle class, while Bud is the only son of a wealthy family. Deanie’s mother (Audrey Christie) cautions Deanie against letting Bud “spoil” her and tells her that nice women don’t enjoy sex. Bud is very much under the thumb of his domineering, booming father (Pat Hingle), who’s set on Bud’s going to Yale and demands that he break off with Deanie because if she gets pregnant, he will have to marry her instead. The young couple’s sexual frustration consumes their lives and winds up with Bud reluctantly preparing for college and Deanie having a nervous breakdown and attempting suicide.
From there, the film toggles back and forth between the separate trajectories of the two young people. Bud attends Yale according to his father’s wishes so he will be able to take the reins of the family’s oil business but feels lost and unfocused. Deanie spends two and a half years recovering in a sanitarium. The picture cools significantly when the two aren’t together.
Deanie’s nervous breakdown isn’t credible. Natalie Wood’s shrill screams and wild-eyed expressions would be more at home in a horror film than a period drama. The breakdown is shocking mostly because of its intensity—this is one of the most extreme reactions to a break-up in film history, and it colors the scene with theatricality rather than pathos. Wood and Kazan should have dialed down the histrionics a few notches. Less hysteria would have been more effective in showing Deanie’s despair. Wood is at her best in the later scenes at the sanitarium, when Deanie has meaningful sessions with a psychiatrist and develops a rapport with a fellow patient. During Deanie’s recuperation, Wood conveys fragility and vulnerability. When Deanie’s parents come to visit, for instance, she’s visibly set back by her mother’s well meaning but unintentionally destructive comments.
Beatty, with looks that would bring him stardom, doesn’t have much to do as Bud at first except embrace and kiss Deanie and express his desire to “go all the way.” We see how Bud tries to be the dutiful son to a blustery father who’d rather talk than listen and lacks the backbone to defy him. Later scenes allow Beatty to broaden the characterization of Bud, but he ultimately comes across as weak, without the courage to advocate for his own happiness.
Pat Hingle is excellent as Bud’s father, Ace Stamper. Loud, often obnoxious, opinionated, and insistent when he has a plan for his children, Stamper rules his household like a tyrant. No one dares to confront him, and if they do, he has the power of the purse to hold over them.
Ginny Stamper (Barbara Loren), Bud’s sister, is a caged lioness, desperate to escape and Iive her own life. Ace keeps her on a short leash because of her past bad choices, and she goes wild as soon as she’s away from her dreaded home. With her promiscuity and excessive drinking, she’s the opposite of “good boy” Bud, who does what Daddy wants. Loden is excellent in all her scenes, conveying a sadness beneath the outspoken, angry, rebellious party girl.
Angelina (Zohra Lampert) enters the film in the final third and has little to do. Angelina is a waitress who offers sympathy to Bud in his lowest moments. Lambert has two major scenes, one in which Angelina takes care of a half-drunk, self-pitying Bud and they get to know each other, and the final scene, when Deanie, back from the sanitarium, visits Bud. In that scene, the camera plays on Lampert’s reactions as Angelina watches the two old friends awkwardly reminisce.
Director Kazan (A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront) navigates difficult subject matter in Splendor in the Grass and elicits memorable performances from Wood, Beatty and a first-class supporting cast. Natalie Wood received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her role as Deanie, and the screenplay by William Inge won the 1962 Best Screenplay Academy Award.
Splendor in the Grass is an early film from a major Hollywood studio to deal seriously with adult subject matter. It couldn’t have been made a few years earlier, when the Hays Code was strictly enforced. Movies would become even more frank toward the end of the 1960s, with the adoption of the rating system established by the Motion Picture Association of America.
Splendor in the Grass was shot by director of photography Boris Kaufman on 35mm film with spherical lenses, finished photochemically, and presented in the aspect ratio of 1.85:1. The Blu-ray from the Warner Archive Collection is sourced from a new 4K scan of the original camera negative and looks radiant. The color palette is bright, with primary colors dominating. Blacks are deep and velvety. Details are well delineated, including classroom decor, wallpaper in the Loomis house, revelers at a speakeasy, Ginny’s outfits, vintage automobiles, and furnishings at the sanitarium. Complexions are well rendered with Natalie Wood’s peaches-and-cream skin especially attractive.
The soundtrack is English 2.0 mono DTS-HD Master Audio. English SDH subtitles are an option. Dialogue is clear and distinct. Engines of vintage automobiles rumble in various scenes, and ambient noise is heard beneath dialogue in a party sequence. David Amram’s score is serviceable but doesn’t adequately reflect music and sounds of the Roaring Twenties.
Bonus materials on the Blu-ray release from Warner Archive include the following:
- Elia Kazan: A Director’s Journey (75:26)
- Original Theatrical Trailer (3:59)
Elia Kazan: A Director’s Journey – This feature-length documentary, written and directed by Richard Schickel, covers Elia Kazan’s career and includes clips from many of the films discussed. Kazan himself offers comments about his various pictures, expresses opinions about performances in his films, and relates on-set anecdotes. Kazan’s final film, America, America, is the director’s favorite, though he’s quick to mention he doesn’t believe it’s his best. He had trouble securing financing, hired an unknown for the lead, and hated working with cinematographer Haskell Wexler, whom he nonetheless regards as a master in his field. But it’s his most personal because it tells the story of his own immigration to America. Kazan began his career with the Group Theater, composed of individuals who were theatrically and politically likeminded. The plays they staged were usually about working-class people. Kazan loved film and wanted to direct movies. A screen test he made as an actor for producer Walter Wanger is shown. Directing at the Group Theater gave him confidence working with actors. Kazan discusses A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, his first feature film; Gentleman’s Agreement, about anti-Semitism; Panic in the Streets, a “thinking person’s action film;” A Streetcar Named Desire, the film that made Marlon Brando a star; Viva Zapata; Best Picture winner On the Waterfront; East of Eden; and Wild River. Kazan talks about testifying at the House Un-American Activities Committee and naming names, which has earned him enemies in the profession ever since. Kazan comments on the controversy when Cardinal Spellman of New York spoke out harshly against Baby Doll, a film the director describes as “childish eroticism played for laughs.” Narrator Eli Wallach concludes this in-depth documentary by saying that Elia Kazan redefined realism in the movies and expanded the range of cinema.
The sexual mores in Splendor in the Grass haven’t aged well. The story has the ingredients of a grand soap opera but Kazan takes it seriously. At some point, the viewer may get tired of Deanie and Bud and long for more of promiscuous, boozy, colorful Ginny. The Technicolor photography makes everything look so pretty that it blunts our reactions to Deanie and Bud’s difficulties. The film shows us two girls different in significant ways but equally trapped in a society that doesn’t extend much sympathy to women. Though the setting is the 1920s, many of the issues are universal. The final scene, hardly the typical Hollywood ending, is probably the film’s most authentic. Splendor in the Grass will remind you of Tennessee Williams’ plays with its larger-than-life figures and fragile heroine, will hold your interest with excellent performances, and will surprise you with its frankness.
- Dennis Seuling