368. Spelndor in the Grass (1961)

Directed By Elia Kazan

Synopsis

Sexual repression is not good for you. Nice girls get no cock and go insane because nice boys go to bad girls to get their jollies. Bad girls get no respect and get cock for the wrong reasons. A no win situation here. But true love can be found in the psychiatric hospital.

Review

How can Elia Kazan, who was essentially a shitty person, direct great films? Well the same can be asked of Woody Allen or D. W. Griffith, or in musical terms Wagner for that matter. We have to be able to separate the work from the man. And Elia Kazan is again masterful in his direction.

Clearly influenced by the new stuff coming out of Europe he applies it to a traditionally American melodrama to great effect. At least he gets the best performance out of Natalie Wood I had seen.

The themes explored here show the shift in the early 1960s to tell the production code to take a hike. Exploring education, sexuality, morals and gender in a way that is more honest than much we have seen until now it manages to transcend the melodrama genre to be a quite powerful film. This is due to his reliance on method acting and some pretty great control of filming techniques which were only now becoming common, making the film feel modern even when some of the opinions expressed in it aren't.

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

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

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind...

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