Grass Around the Splendor

Apparently, there's a new documentary on Natalie Wood coming out this week, so TCM is running a night of Wood's movies tonight, starting at 8:00 PM with Splendor in the Grass.

Wood plays Wilma Dean Loomis, nicknamed "Deanie". She's a high school senior in Kansas in the fall of 1928, the child of middle-class parents. The parents have been making money in the stock market, however, like a lot of people in the Roaring 20s, beacuse of the oil boom in the region. That oil boom is responsible for making the Stamper family wealthy too. Son Bud (Warren Beatty) is Deanie's boyfriend.

The two, being teenagers with raging hormones, have thoughts about how far to take the relationship, although they really don't take it all that far, in no small part because both of them have parents really pressuring them into staying on the straight and narrow: Deanie's Mom (Audrey Christie) and Bud's dad Ace (Pat Hingle). In Bud's case, there's also the example of his older sister Ginny (Barbara Loden), who went off to "art school" in Chicago and wound up with an annulled marriage because Dad thought the husband only wanted her money.

So there's all sorts of pressure on both Bud and Deanie, and it winds up affecting both of them badly. Bud's perfectly willing to marry Deanie, and would like to run what was the old family farm before oil made the Stampers rich, but Dad's having none of that, wanting Bud to go to Yale. Bud also seems to be the big man on campus, popular with the ladies and good at all the sports. Having to be the good one in the family comes back to haunt him after Ginny goes off at a party, getting Bud in a fight and then some time afterwards Bud collapses during a basketball game. I thought the two were related in the Bud was supposed to have a concussion or something similar, but here he's diagnosed as having a bad case of pneumonia.

As for Deanie, Bud eventually breaks up with her because he's afraid that if he does anything with her she'll end up like Ginny. Deanie, however, sees Ginny and comes up with the wacky idea that being a good girl isn't going to get her anywhere, so she responds by having a nervous breakdown and trying to commit suicide. Her parents sell off their oil stock which they had been saving in hopes of sending Deanie to college, instead sending her to a sanatorium.

It turns out to be a good thing, of course, since we all know the stock market is going to crash in October, right when Bud is a bored freshman at Yale who clearly has no desire to be there and who is thankfully going to get out, although in a bad way, when the crash bankrupts his father. But can Bud and Deanie live happily ever after?

Splendor in the Grass is another movie that, although it has a lot of good ideas, is one that I found some pretty big problems with. The movie meanders, going through a lot of nowhere before ending rather abruptly. Natalie Wood's breakdown scene is also one that I found myself laughing at as opposed to being the serious thing it's supposed to be. The New Year's party scene where Ginny gets drunk and Bud gets punched also goes on rather longer than it should have.

But there's also enough in Splendor in the Grass that makes it worth a watch, from the production design and cinematography as well as some of the supporting performances. It's one that I'm glad to have seen, although I don't think I'll be revisiting it any time soon.

Splendor in the Grass has received multiple DVD releases, although it looks like some of them may be out of print, which is always surprising when you consider one of them is from the Warner Archive.