(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Movie Review: Splendor in the Grass (1961) [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-12-30 … … … … SPOILER ALERT! In the opening scene of Splendor in the Grass, which begins in Kansas in 1928, we see Bud Stamper (Warren Beatty) and Wilma Dean “Deanie” Loomis (Natalie Wood) making out in his car, with a raging waterfall in the background to symbolize their passion. Bud wants to have sex, but Deanie says they mustn’t. Disappointed, Bud takes her home. Sexual frustration is not the only thing that makes these two teenagers miserable. They both have parents. Deanie’s mother is worried that Bud will get her pregnant. And even if she doesn’t get pregnant, her mother tells her that boys don’t respect a girl they can go all the way with. They want a nice girl for a wife. In fact, nice girls don’t like sex. They just let their husbands come near them so they can have children. Now, tell me again why boys want to marry nice girls. Bud’s father, Ace Stamper (Pat Hingle), wants Bud to go to Yale. Bud doesn’t want to go to Yale, saying he’s not a good student. He wants to go to an agricultural college for a couple of years and then take over the family ranch and raise cattle. He figures he could marry Deanie and take her to college with him. Ace says, “Ranching’s no life.” He prefers being an oil man. In fact, when the movie begins, he has just hit another gusher, which is pumping a hundred barrels an hour. He is the opposite of Rock Hudson in Giant (1956) and Melvyn Douglas in Hud (1963), who loved raising cattle and despised the idea of drilling for oil. In general, we are supposed to think there is something wholesome and fulfilling about raising cattle, while drilling for oil is just about making lots of money. Splendor in the Grass likewise expects us to make those associations, approving of Bud’s desire to work his father’s ranch, while feeling there is something wrong with the way Ace is interested only in his oil wells. Ace has ill-concealed contempt for Deanie, thinking her family is beneath his own. He too is worried that Bud might get her pregnant. “You get a girl in trouble, and you gotta take the consequences,” he says, meaning Bud would have to marry her. To avoid the risk of getting Deanie pregnant, Ace suggests that Bud find another girl and have sex with her instead. In fact, later in the movie, we assume Bud does just that, ending his relationship with Deanie and then having sex with Juanita Howard, known around school for being no better than she should be. But if Bud had gotten Juanita pregnant, she would have been the one he had to marry. Different girl, same result. Perhaps Ace knew that he was in a movie, which meant that nice girls like Deanie get pregnant if they have sex just once, whereas for sluts like Juanita, their very promiscuity seems to act as a kind of birth control. Bud gets so stressed out about it all that he collapses and has to go to the hospital where he almost dies from pneumonia. Deanie, on the other hand, tries to be like Juanita, first with Bud, but that doesn’t work, and then with Allen “Toots” Tuttle (Gary Lockwood). But she changes her mind at the last minute. Toots almost date rapes her, but she gets away and tries to commit suicide by jumping into the river so she will go over the falls. She is rescued, but then has a complete mental collapse and has to go to an insane asylum. It would seem, then, that the combination of sexual frustration and parental pressure has caused Bud and Deanie to collapse under the strain, physically in Bud’s case, mentally in Deanie’s case. But that raises the question, why aren’t all their friends in high school also collapsing in one way or another? As for sexual frustration, when Toots and some other guys are talking about Juanita, they agree that she isn’t like the other girls they know, who expect a guy to be satisfied with a goodnight kiss. Given that, we wonder why those other girls in the high school aren’t filling up the psych wards in the local hospitals themselves, since they aren’t getting anymore sex than Deanie. And couples break up all the time in high school, so the other girls are likely experiencing that as well. As for the boys in high school, Toots and a few other guys on the football team might be using Juanita as an outlet for their sexual needs, but we don’t get the idea that she is servicing the entire male student body. So, why aren’t most of the boys in that school having a bout of pneumonia themselves? Does that mean the difference lies in parental pressure? In Bud’s case, that might make sense. Bud’s father is about as obnoxious as they come, and Deanie meets a guy named John in the mental institution, who says he is there because his father put pressure on him to be a great surgeon. But surely these are not the only two boys in that community whose fathers are putting pressure on them for some reason, so we have to wonder why the other boys in the high school are holding up so well. As for Deanie, the only parental pressure that she experiences is that of her mother telling her not to have sex with Bud. Now, it’s not like the mothers of the other girls at the high school are telling their daughters that it’s all right to have premarital sex. We don’t even have to be shown a conversation between Kay (Sandy Dennis) and her mother to know that. But Kay isn’t destined for a mental breakdown herself, nor are any of the other girls. If it seems as though one of the moral lessons of this movie is that sexual repression is bad, that is belied by the situation with Bud’s older sister Ginny (Barbara Loden). She represents the Roaring Twenties in the flesh, referred to as a “flapper.” It is rumored that while in college, some “cake eater” got her pregnant and married her for her money, but Ace had the marriage annulled and got her an abortion. Now back home, she continues with her wanton ways, not being one to suffer from the stress of going without sex. But the movie condemns her for her behavior. Toward the end of the movie, we find out that she died in a car accident. One of Deanie’s friends says, “We all knew something like that would happen the way she carried on.” In other words, movie karma killed Ginny for being sexually liberated. Sometimes you just can’t win. While the characters in this movie talk about how the stock of Ace’s company, Stamper Oil, keeps going up and up, they have no sense of the doom that we know awaits them in the stock market. Deanie’s parents are lucky, at least in that regard. When Deanie needs to be institutionalized, her father sells all his stock in Stamper Oil in order to pay for it, not realizing he is doing so just as it is reaching a top. But Ace is not so lucky. The crash wipes him out, and he jumps out of the window of a building, the form of suicide that was de rigueur for those ruined by the stock market crash in October of 1929, probably because the fall from a great height was symbolic of the fall in the price of stocks from their great height. Mrs. Stamper, now a widow, is said to be as “poor as a church mouse,” forced to live with her folks Tulsa. We are so used to watching movies in which someone is wiped out by the stock market crash that we accept this without question as we watch this movie for the first time. But upon a second viewing, we realize that would not apply to Ace and his eponymous oil company. When the stock market crashed, the oil wells did not crash along with them. Think of all the movies you have seen set in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, where people are still driving their automobiles, which still had to be filled up with gasoline. That means that oil was still being pumped out of the ground, refined, and distributed, none of which would have happened unless it could have been done at a profit. Presumably, Ace is the majority stockholder, which means that he is the principal owner of those oil wells and remains such, even if the price of the stock has plummeted. As president of the company, he could continue to pay himself a salary out of the revenue stream produced by pumping oil, even though the price for a barrel of oil decreased somewhat after the crash. And some or all of the profit made by the company could continue to be distributed as dividends. The decrease in the price per share of the stock of Stamper Oil would not change that. And Wall Street never puts a lien on your physical assets. To get some idea of how much money would be involved, we might recall a scene from Giant that takes place in the 1920s. Elizabeth Taylor is talking to a man and his wife who live on a small ranch, but who had a bit of luck. A gusher came in the previous year, which is making them a million dollars a month. Even allowing for a drop in the price of oil with the onset of the Great Depression, I’d say these folks would still be doing all right. In any event, no one in that movie gets wiped out by the stock market crash. We might imagine that Ace committed suicide because he was disgraced, no longer as wealthy as he once fancied himself to be. But his widow would not end up being “poor as a church mouse.” There would still be plenty of money coming in from the sale of the oil being pumped out of the ground, allowing her to live in reasonable comfort, even if the amount was less than that in Giant. In other words, we can easily imagine a less drastic outcome for the Stamper family than the one depicted in this movie, one in which they might have had to live a little less extravagantly, but that’s all. But movie karma would not have been satisfied with that. Ace had to be punished with nothing less than financial ruin and death for being a greedy oil man. And that is in keeping with the melodramatic excess that infects the whole movie, as we have seen with Bud, Deanie, and Ginny. It would be easy to imagine less drastic outcomes for them as well, for the simple reason that such outcomes would also be more realistic. Well, Bud ends up married to Angie, a likable Italian girl. They have a baby, and there is another on the way. They are living on the ranch his father owned. (The ranch didn’t get destroyed by the stock market crash either.) Deanie, who will soon be married to John, goes to visit Bud. Angie is a little embarrassed by the way she is dressed, but after all, she is in the middle of doing housework and wasn’t expecting company. Deanie, on the other hand, is rightfully embarrassed, realizing that she is overdressed. We gather that she wanted to show Bud how well off she was by being smartly attired. Of all the lessons of love that we learn along the way, overcoming this need to show those we once loved how happy we are without them is something of which very few of us are capable. The title of this movie is from William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” The relevant section is first cited by the teacher in Deanie’s English class, most of which is recalled by Deanie as she and her friends drive away from Bud’s ranch: What though the radiance which was once so bright Be now for ever taken from my sight, Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind…. I don’t get it. With all the misery endured by Bud and Deanie while they were in high school, how those years can bring these lines to mind escapes me. What “splendor in the grass”? What “glory in the flower”? If I were Deanie, I’d be relieved to know that I could finally put all that behind me. 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