Review of Splendor in the Grass

I watched Splendor in the Grass for the fourth time last night. I saw it when it first came out and thought it was a masterpiece. I saw in ten year later at a college film festival and it was already starting to show signs of age, largely because of the social changes between 1961 and 1971. Even then the audience was starting to make fun of the movie. What looked bold in 1961 looked dated and repressed in 1971. I saw it perhaps a decade later and it left no memorable impression. Last night I could barely make it through. The characters felt intense to me when I was young. Now it seems to me that they seemed intense only because there was a lack of any real substance to dilute their one emotion. Each character has one defining emotion – Deanie is fragile, all the boys are sexually obsessed, Bud's father in a blow-hard who never stops talking, etc. The characters are so lacking in nuance. Bud is laughable and pathetic in his longing and frustration. The silliness of the high-school girls, squealing and jumping whenever they met was a ridiculous stereotype. These were one dimensional stereotypes not real people. The only black characters are shown learning, wide-eyed at the prospect of witnessing Ginny Stamper's gang rape. I found myself wondering if this could really have been done by Elia Kazan. I even cringed at the things Natalie Wood did to convey youth. It had all the subtly of vaudeville melodrama. On the plus side, I enjoyed Deanie's mother's obsession with the stock market. I understand that this was typical of the 1920's when average people played the market naively, believing they could be come rich, fooled by the market into thinking they were smart when they were only lucky. The portrayal of this aspect of society was more interesting last night than fifty years ago. I also enjoyed Bud's introduction to pizza. We take pizza for granted, forgetting that it did not become common in the US until the 1950s. Bud learns of pizza as a college student when he's living in New Haven. Fifty years ago someone's hearing of pizza for the first time would not have seemed surprising, but it was bit of a treat. Overall, the movie is still interesting because of the time it portrays, but the characters are crudely drawn by current standards, the better movies of its era, or even Kazan's body of work.