Splendor in the Grass is a 1961 American Technicolor period drama film that tells a story of a teenage girl navigating her feelings of sexual repression, love, and heartbreak. Written by William Inge, who appears briefly as a Protestant clergyman and who won an Oscar for his screenplay, the film was directed by Elia Kazan.
About Splendor in the Grass in brief
Splendor in the Grass is a 1961 American Technicolor period drama film that tells a story of a teenage girl navigating her feelings of sexual repression, love, and heartbreak. Written by William Inge, who appears briefly as a Protestant clergyman and who won an Oscar for his screenplay, the film was directed by Elia Kazan and features a score by jazz composer David Amram. In 1928 Kansas, Wilma Dean \”Deanie\” Loomis is a teen girl who follows her mother’s advice to resist her desire for sex with her boyfriend Bud Stamper. In turn, Bud reluctantly follows the advice of his father Ace to wait to marry Deanie until after college and to find another kind of girl with whom to satisfy his desires. Bud’s parents are ashamed of his older sister Ginny, a flapper and sexually-promiscuous party girl who smokes, drinks, and has recently been brought back from Chicago, where her parents had a marriage annulled to someone who married her solely for her money. At a New Year’s Eve party, Ginny becomes drunk to the humiliation and disappointment of her parents. She leaves the party with a man, and Bud finds her outside in a car being raped by the man, a crowd of men surrounding them. Bud takes Deanie home after the party and breaks up with her. Shortly afterward, depressed that Bud ended their relationship, Deanie attends a party with classmate Toots Tuttle and comes on to him.
Escaping from Toots and driven close to madness, she attempts to commit suicide by jumping in the pond, but is rescued just before reaching the falls. Her parents sell their oil stock to pay for her institutionalization, which actually turns out to be a blessing in disguise, because they make a profit prior to the Crash of 1929 that leads to the Great Depression. While Deanie is in the institution, she meets another patient, Johnny Masterson, who has anger issues targeted at his parents, who want him to become a surgeon. Meanwhile, Bud is sent to Yale, where he fails practically all his courses but meets Angelina, the daughter of Italian immigrants who run a local restaurant in New Haven. In October 1929, Bud’s father travels to New Haven in an attempt to persuade the dean not to expel Bud from school; Bud tells the dean he only aspires to own a ranch. He takes Bud to New York for a weekend, including to a cabaret nightclub, then commits suicide by jump from a building – something he had been joking about just a short time earlier – and Bud must identify the body. Deanie returns home from the asylum after two years and six months.
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This page is based on the article Splendor in the Grass published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 09, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
