The film opens with a floridly suggestive visual metaphor: as high school sweethearts Bud (Warren Beatty, in his screen debut) and Deanie (Natalie Wood) grapple in a backseat, a waterfall gushes in the background. Set in rural Kansas in 1928, playwright William Inge\u2019s script takes its time to introduce the main players and the social milieu they\u2019re ensnared in. It\u2019s a classic set up: Bud comes from wealth while Deanie is poor. He\u2019s a football star with an overbearing father who wants him to go to Yale in the fall. Her mother is deeply concerned about her daughter getting a reputation in town. \u201cBoys don\u2019t respect a girl they can go all the way with,\u201d she counsels Deanie after Bud has brought her home late. The message to both is clear, if shrouded in coded language: don\u2019t let things go too far or it will ruin their futures. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Their friends and neighbors offer little respite from such harsh judgement. In class, Deanie whispers back and forth with her girlfriends about the dubious purity of a peer. In the locker room after a game, Bud is surrounded by boys jovially boasting about the girls who \u201cknow what it\u2019s all about.\u201d When Bud and Deanie are together, they must be mindful of the prying eyes of older bystanders, who seem to simultaneously envy and condemn them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then there\u2019s Bud\u2019s sister Ginny (an electric Barbara Loden), who has recently been brought home following a disastrous stint in Chicago; her presence in the film\u2019s first half will linger like a dark cloud over the second. Ginny is \u201cspoiled\u201d in more ways than one. After getting kicked out of school, she was briefly married though her father engineered an annulment. The town gossips whisper about her being in the family way and having \u201can awful operation.\u201d In contrast to the grimly dutiful Bud, Ginny is defiant in the face of local hypocrisy, leaning all the way into the low expectations that people have for her, dressing in the flapper style and openly consorting with men. \u201cOne of these days you\u2019ll find out and then God help you,\u201d she tells Bud after he tries to keep her from a rendez-vous with a married bootlegger. In a scene set on New Year\u2019s Eve that serves as the film\u2019s inflection point, Bud rescues Ginny from an attempted assault. The trauma causes him to break things off with Deanie, spurring them on their separate paths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Inge\u2019s script and Kazan\u2019s direction work in tandem to establish a hothouse atmosphere that mimics the intense emotions of its teenage protagonists. There\u2019s hardly a moment that doesn\u2019t feel primed to explode. It can be suffocating, if intentionally so, but some critics at the time reacted poorly to what they perceived as the film\u2019s excesses \u2013 Brendan Gill of The New Yorker<\/em> called Splendor <\/em>\u201cas phony a picture as I can remember seeing.\u201d Bud and Deanie\u2019s parents came in for particular criticism, with Dwight Macdonald of Esquire <\/em>calling them \u201cstupid to the point of villainy.\u201d But it\u2019s key to the larger points about tradition and inheritance that Inge and Kazan are making that the adults are just as overwrought as their children are. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s hopefully not a huge spoiler to reveal that the two kids don\u2019t end up together, but the way that they don\u2019t is both uniquely painful and entirely natural. Following the turn to 1929, the film picks up speed, flashing forward to Bud as he suffers through his first semester at Yale. Meanwhile, Deanie has been institutionalized following a suicide attempt. It\u2019s in these later scenes that Wood\u2019s delicate performance emerges as Splendor<\/em>\u2019s true soul. Communicating largely through her watchful eyes, Deanie is learning to reconcile her instinctive innocence with the terrible knowledge she\u2019s acquired. \u201cYou have to start thinking of your parents as people,\u201d her psychiatrist advises, an instruction that leads directly to the film\u2019s bittersweet final scene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two years on from their unrequited love affair, Bud and Deanie are reunited, though their circumstances will keep it from being permanent. \u201cYou seem happy,\u201d Deanie says. \u201cI don\u2019t think too much about happiness,\u201d Bud replies. It\u2019s the sort of casually heartbreaking statement about one\u2019s life that\u2019s weighted with decades worth of generational mistakes that have been passed down. \u201cI guess when we get born, we take our chances,\u201d Deanie\u2019s mother observes earlier on, which is another way of saying that we\u2019re often shaped by forces beyond our control. That includes our parents but as Splendor in the Grass<\/em> makes clear, when we grow up, we become those forces, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Splendor in the Grass” is streaming on the Criterion Channel <\/a>and Hoopla<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/splendor-still-1024x576.jpg\")
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