Splendor in the Grass (Kazan, 1961): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.30pm
This 35mm presentation (also screening on June 8th) is is part of the Wanda and Beyond season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.BFI introduction:
A tale of unfulfilled teenage desire set in Kansas circa 1928, Elia
Kazan’s hothouse parable (with an Academy Award winning screenplay by
playwright William Inge) examines the toll of Puritanical social
propriety and sexual repression on high-school sweethearts: Bud Stamper,
the child of oil wealth (Beatty’s Hollywood debut) and the fragile
Deanie. Loden’s tempestuous role as Bud’s wild flapper sister Ginny
provides a prominent foil for the film’s critique of judgmental
small-town mores.
Adrian Martin introduction:
From the first notes of David Amram’s intense score and the
opening image of Bud (first-timer Warren Beatty) and Deanie (Natalie Wood)
kissing in a car by a raging waterfall, Splendor in the Grass sums up
the appeal of Hollywood melodrama at its finest: the passions repressed by
society (the setting is Kansas 1928) find a displaced expression in every
explosive burst of colour, sound and gesture. Repression is everywhere in this movie, a force that twists people
in monstrous, dysfunctional directions. Men are obliged to be successful and
macho while women must choose between virginity and whorishness – as is the
case for Bud’s unconventional flapper sister, indelibly incarnated by Barbara
Loden. Director Elia Kazan, like Arthur Penn, worked at the intersection
of studio-nurtured classical narrative and the innovative, dynamic forms
introduced by Method acting and the French New Wave. Here, collaborating with
the dramatist William Inge, he achieved a sublime synthesis of both approaches. The film offers a lucid, concentrated analysis of the social
contradictions determined by class, wealth, industry, technology, moral values
and gender roles within the family unit. At the same time, it is a film in
which the characters register as authentic individuals, acting and reacting in
a register that is far from the
Hollywood
cliché.
Full review here.
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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