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Plot Summary
Screen legends Warren Beatty, in an auscpicious debut, and Natalie Wood are perfectly cast in this sensual, sentimental and romantic drama set in rural Kansas. At the end of the Roaring '20s, Wood and Beatty are teens in love, torn apart by family and sexual and peer pressures. At the beginning of the Great Depression, Wood is an emotionally broken young woman who revisits her past while trying to rebuild her life. Oscar-winner Elia Kazan ("On the Waterfront," "East of Eden") directed, and the screenplay by William Inge ("Picnic," "Bus Stop") won an Oscar, with a nomination for Wood. Recently selected by the prestigious American Film Institute as one of the 400 greatest American films of all time.
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Rotten Tomatoes Movie Reviews
TOMATOMETER
85%- Reviews Counted: 13
- Fresh: 11
- Rotten: 2
- Average Rating: 7.2/10
Top Critics' Reviews
Fresh: Splendor in the Grass is a prestigious, top-of-the-line, sensitively-handled melodramatic literalization of the axiom "If you touch yourself too much, you'll go crazy."
Rotten: A complicated film that never really successfully yokes together the themes of money-making and sexuality, it reveals both Kazan's operatic sensibility and his inability to follow an argument rigorously through.
Customer Reviews
A Beautiful Film
"Splendor in the Grass" is a true classic. It deals with first love between Deanie Loomis and Bud Stamper. It's both heartbreaking and beautiful. I highly recommend it to anyone who is a fan of romance stories.
Great Movie!! A definite Classic!!!
I have watched this movie many times as a child and as a teenager. Also I saw this movie maybe once or twice in my early twenties, including the remake, and all those times I had focused on the intensity of the love story and cried at the sad ending. I have not seen this movie in twenty-four years. Since then, I have read many theories and descriptions as to what this movie means and what it is about. Some have said it is about sexual repression that existed during the nineteen twenties. Others have claimed that it is about the social distinctions of the rich and poor. Well, I watched this movie again for the first in twenty some odd years and found that it has taken on a whole new meaning for me. I realized that it is about navigating the rocky road of adulthood and understanding that the hardest lesson to learn in life is that the only thing that we can control is ourselves and our own behaviors. We do not have control over situations that occur outside of and around us, but we can control how we react to them. The backdrop of the stock market crash bears this out. Bud's father thought he was in control of everything, including his son Bud, and found out the hard way and much too late that this just was not so. He committed suicide when this truth finally hit home and realized that he had lost all of his money. I guess you can also say that this movie is about making family your number one priority. When you do that everything else just seems to fall into place. As was the case with Deanie's family, who survived the crash because they had sold their stocks, to pay for Deanie's hospital care. The acting was superb and everything about this movie is absolutely amazing.
A Great Classic!
Natalie Wood is amazing and very heartbreaking to watch in some scenes. I couldn't believe this was Warren Beatty's first movie. He did great in this movie, however, Bonnie and Clyde was his best film of all time. If you like classic love stories, this would be the movie to add to your iPod. I would definitely recommend it.
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- $17.99
- Genre: Drama
- Released: 1961
- © 1961 A Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.