| About
the Movie
 In
1981, Michelle Pfeiffer
played the part of Ginny Stamper in a new
television version 'Splendor
in the Grass' broadcasted on NBC in
October 26, 1981.
The original stuff was a William
Inge screenplay which was first produced
in 1961 as a film directed by Elia
Kazan and starring Warren
Beatty and Natalie
Wood. At the time, it was considered
rather steamy stuff, its story of adolescent
sexual longings drenched in standard Freudian
imagery, most notably the passion-and-purifcation
symbol of rushing water.
Twenty years later, in a era of sexual permissiveness,
''Splendor in the Grass''
becomes something of a double period piece,
reflecting the innocence of the early 1960's
in Hollywood as much as that of the late 1920's
in Kansas, the period and place in which the
drama unfolds. It offers the typical Inge
mixture of exploding emotions and repression,
of unsettling psychological forces being confronted
in the dark at the top of the stairs in the
most ordinary of homes.
Plot
Summary:
The television movie features Melissa
Gilbert and Cyril
O'Reilly as Deanie and Bud, the young
couple trying desperately to live by the strictly
enforced rules. As Deanie's frigid mother
keeps warning her, ''Boys don't respect girls
they can go all the way with.'' Meanwhile,
understandably aroused by extended petting
sessions near the local waterfall - the rushing
water is still prominent - Bud is increasingly
frustrated and ready to wander off with one
of the town's ''looser'' girls.
 Bud
has to cope with his wealthy and domineering
father, played by Ned
Beatty in one of his marvelous signature
turns of uninhibited but still vulnerable
vulgarity. The son would like to marry Deanie
and settle down to becoming a rancher. The
father wants him to go to Yale and become
respectable and influential. Meanwhile, Deanie
gets little understanding from her dizzily
determined mother, played by Eva
Marie Saint in her best neo-Martha
Scott manner. While mama rattles on about
soaring stock quotations and virginity, her
daughter is tumbling furiously toward a nervous
breakdown.
On the sidelines is a generous sampling of
representative types. Bud's sister, Ginny
(Michelle Pfeiffer),
is a hyperactive flapper, whose promiscuous
ways get daddy excited in more ways than one.
Toots (Jim Young)
is the high-school Lothario, who harbors none
of Bud's scruples about premarital sex. And
the local physician (Nicholas
Pryor) functions as a kind of friendly
psychiatrist.
 Eventually,
of course, we get to the message of the title.
A class in 19th-century Romantic poetry is
studying the Wordsworth ode on ''Intimations
of Mortality'': Though nothing can bring back
the hour Of splendor in the grass, of glory
in the flower; We will grieve not, rather
find Strength in what remains behind ... Deanie,
who has just found out that Bud is going with
another girl, is called on to read the lines.
In one of the production's more unbelievable
scenes, she begins sobbing almost uncontrollably.
It takes several minutes for the startlingly
dense teacher to inquire with sudden concern,
''Deanie, are you all right?''
Helped by the stock market crash of 1929,
the story comes to no comforting conclusions.
Happiness isn't something the principal characters
think much about anymore. ''You've got to
take what comes,'' one of them observes. Mr.
Inge's script, adapted for television by John
Herzfeld, retains an ability to move
us with its darkly simmering sweetness. The
performances of Miss Gilbert and Mr. O'Reilly
are exceptionally good. Richard
C. Serafian's direction is, unlike
Mr. Kazan's, sensitively unobtrusive.
Source: The
New York Times |
