Splendor in the Grass

This is a fine movie, with a great screenplay by William Inge, director Elia Kazan's ability to convey powerful emotions, and a marvelous performance by Natalie Wood.

Typically relegated to the second ranks among playwrights, Inge deserves more critical respect than he receives. Here, as in "Picnic," he celebrates romantic love, shows how inseparable it is from sex, and portrays the damage done by a conventional world that insists on separating them.

We belittle the small-town characters in the film, who see the world in terms of "good" girls and "bad" girls, but many reviewers have shown a similarly reductionist outlook on a more sophisticated level. They have seen this movie as "Freudian," showing love to be a sublimation of sex. Or they have belittled it as just another "rebellious youth" film of the type that was so popular in the 1950s and early 1960s. Pauline Kael wrote about Natalie Wood's apparently too active "behind," and on TCM, Robert Osborne introduced the movie as one in which the young couple is motivated by "hormones."

In the movie, it is plain that the young couple truly love each other, and it is also plain that they desire each other sexually. So it always will be with young people in love. This is the glory of romance. People frequently love without a sexual involvement, and people frequently have sex without love. But romantic love is a matter of both "body" and "soul" acting as one.