Splendor in the Grass (1961)

Interesting facts

• Awards: 1 · Nominations: 2. Including: Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Screenplay

Splendor in the Grass is a 1961 American period drama film produced and directed by Elia Kazan, from a screenplay written by William Inge. It stars Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty as two high school sweethearts, navigating feelings of sexual repression, love, and heartbreak. Pat Hingle, Audrey Christie, Barbara Loden, Zohra Lampert, and Joanna Roos are featured in supporting roles.

Production

Filmed in New York City at Filmways Studios, Splendor in the Grass is based on people whom screenwriter William Inge knew while growing up in Kansas in the 1920s. He told the story to director Elia Kazan when they were working on a production of Inge's play The Dark at the Top of the Stairs in 1957. They agreed that it would make a good film and that they wanted to work together on it. Inge wrote it first as a novel, then as a screenplay.

The film's title is taken from a line of William Wordsworth's poem "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood":

What though the radiance which was once so bright

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

Two years before writing the screenplay for the film, Inge wrote Glory in the Flower (1953), a stage play whose title comes from the same line of the Wordsworth poem. The play relates the story of two middle-aged, former lovers who meet again briefly at a diner after a long estrangement; they are essentially the same characters as Bud and Deanie, though the names are Bus and Jackie.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.