Splendor in the Grass |  | Director: Elia Kazan
Actors: Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty, Pat Hingle, Audrey Christie, Barbara Loden
Studio: Warner Home Video
Category: DVD
List Price: $19.98
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Rating:  1 reviews
Format: Color, DVD, Original recording remastered, Widescreen, NTSC
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Subtitled), French (Subtitled)
Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 124 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.3 x 0.6
MPN: WARD091617D
UPC: 883929062454
EAN: 0883929062454
Theatrical Release Date: 1961
Release Date: February 3, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 02/03/2009 Run time: 124 minutes Rating: Nr
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| Customer Reviews:
Teenaged Sexual Repression Captured Vividly by Kazan's Sure Hand and Wood's Best Work February 23, 2009
Ed Uyeshima (San Francisco, CA USA)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
In the same way he was able to extract a searing performance from Andy Griffith in 1957's A Face in the Crowd, master director Elia Kazan gets similarly stellar results from Natalie Wood in this classic 1961 melodrama about youthful sexual repression in rural 1920's Kansas. In the same year as her Maria in West Side Story, she has never been more affecting then she is here as Deanie Loomis, the local butcher's daughter deeply in love with Bud Stamper, the son of an oil scion and the high school football hero. They are the senior sweethearts everyone expects to marry, but both have to battle constantly with their sexual longing and their grasping parents.
The ruling moral code restricts Deanie more than Bud who ends up cavorting with a good-time girl named Juanita. The indiscretion overwhelms Deanie who attempts suicide and ends up in a sanitarium for her fragile mental state. A few years later with their lives on divergent paths, they meet again to come to terms with each other. While the whole film is beautifully executed thanks to Kazan's sure hand and William Inge's screenplay (his first directly for the screen), it's the last fifteen minutes that really resonate with the characters expressing their emotions with a minimum of dialogue. Otherwise, there are plenty of heated moments of melodrama along with soap opera elements familiar to anyone who has seen 1955's Picnic based on Inge's successful Broadway play.
At her most beautiful, Wood is wondrous as she moves fluidly from innocently infatuated to obsessive to resigned. As the none-too-bright Bud, Warren Beatty is charismatic in his film debut and makes Deanie's powerful fixation completely understandable. There are several standout performances among the supporting cast with Audrey Christie pitch-perfect as Deanie's unsympathetic mother, Pat Hingle in blowhard mode as Bud's power-hungry father, and Zohra Lampert as Angie, the self-effacing waitress Bud meets at Yale. The classic Wordsworth poem from which the film's title is derived makes a fitting coda for this movie, and I still feel the intractable sense of longing in the two lead characters every time I see this movie. The 2009 DVD offers the original theatrical trailer and a familiar 1961 Roadrunner cartoon short, "Beep Prepared".
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