Splendor in the Grass

Screening on Film

Directed by Elia Kazan.
With Warren Beatty, Natalie Wood, Pat Hingle.
US, 1961, 35mm, color, 124 min.
Print source: Warner Bros.

Among the most emotionally powerful of all Kazan's films, Splendor in the Grass effectively uses its period story and setting—the 1929 Wall Street Crash—to speak implicitly to the emergent youth movement and generational tensions of the early 1960s. Working closely with playwright William Inge, Kazan fought off multiple attempts to censor the film's frank critique of American Puritanism and capitalist excess as two sides of the same counterfeit coin. Inge and Kazan's shared interest in psychoanalysis pushed their characterization of sexual awakening to a devastating extreme, a limit point of superimposed desire and madness embodied by a radiant and fragile Natalie Wood and a dashingly awkward Warren Beatty, in his first screen role.