Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Motompa Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Phillipa Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Richie-67-485852 Good movie to visit with your youth and high school days even though this takes place in the early 1900's it still helps to bring back the memories for the viewer. Quality acting and realistic story of life for teens in a simple town some where in the USA. The story has a sensuous undertone and feel as we watch hormones go to work but never really finding closure. The emphasis at that time in that place was being a good boy and girl and if you were not you were known for that too. The movie brings in the crash of 29 and how it changed lives as well as having all that life can offer and not being happy. Wholesome down to earth scenes of family dinners, dances, gatherings and some high school thrown in. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may for time old time is still a flyin for this same flower that lives today tomorrow will be dying applies here...

sol- Titled after a poem by William Wordsworth, this sizzling drama set during the late 1920s is perhaps best summed up by the female protagonist's interpretation of Wordsworth's words as she states "when we grow up, we have to forget the ideals of youth". The story circles around two romantically involved high school students who eventually come to accept that their shared dream of being happily married will not come to fruition. Tragically, the fault is not with them but rather their parents who fail to take them seriously and excellent as Natalie Wood is in the main role as solid as Warren Beatty is as her beau, Pat Hingle steals every scene he is in as Beatty's overbearing father, more concerned about his son being successful than happy. Almost a decade before writing, directing and starring 'Wanda', Barbara Loden is also just as good here as Beatty's flapper sister whose increasing rebelliousness and promiscuity only makes Hingle more and more convinced that he needs to shelter Beatty from any possible mistakes in life. The fact that Loden disappears halfway through the film never quite feels right; Wood's psychosis as a result of being sexually deprived also feels a bit fanciful, but themes and ideas of parental over-control and unintentionally poor parental advice still resonate through and through. The film is also smart enough not to fall back on an unlikely upbeat ending, instead opting for a more realistic portrait of individuals forced to move on in life. It is potent stuff and Wood has never been more radiant than she is here.

MartinHafer "Splendor in the Grass" has a very high rating of 7.8 on IMDb and most of the reviews are very positive. Well, this is a case where I am out of step with prevailing opinion and I'd like to explain why. Although the plot was interesting and somewhat like the great French film "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg", the execution of this plot was very problematic to me. Often instead of being reasonable, the actors overact and the director SHOULD have reigned them in...though I am certainly in the minority on this one. The story is about two high school students (Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood) who are desperately in love...but his father wants the son to go off to college and graduate before he considers marrying anyone. But the youngsters are insistent...and eventually the girl inexplicably loses her mind and things DON'T work out as they should.So let's talk about the problems. Beatty and Wood were about 23 each playing 17 year-olds. This was obvious and the parts should have gone to much younger actors. And, the whole going off the deep end because she DIDN'T have sex was truly bizarre--a weird re-working of the rotten film "Sex Madness". In "Sex Madness", premarital sex leads to insanity and here in "Splendor in the Grass" NOT having sex has the same effect!! This is just dumb...as is Wood's overacting when she loses her mind. It was almost laughable. So, despite a lot of great ratings and reviews, I found the film just didn't cut it and seems silly and dated.

Gideon24 Splendor in the Grass is the 1961 classic of forbidden love, mental illness, and family manipulation that features the finest performance of Natalie Wood's career and marked the film debut of Warren Beatty.Set in a small town in 1920's Kansas, this is the story of a mentally fragile high school student named Deenie Loomis (Wood) who enters a doomed romance with school stud Bud Stamper (Beatty), an aimless young man who allows his life to be quietly manipulated by his wealthy father (Pat Hingle), who is grooming Bud to take over the family business but in the meantime has decided that Deenie is not good enough for his son and forces him to end the romance, which sends Deenie on a slow descent into insanity, which actually climaxes with her being institutionalized.In the tradition of cinematic couples like Scarlett and Rhett, George Eastman and Angela Findlay, and Katie Morofsky and Hubbell Gardner, screenwriter William Inge has created star-crossed lovers who we immediately empathize with but also know that they are doomed.Elia Kazan's vivid direction and his respect for Inge's story is evident, and there is effective support from Hingle and from Audrey Christie as Deenie's harridan of a mother, but the real selling point here is Wood, who turns in a blistering and evocative performance as the fragile Deenie, a performance that earned Wood her first Oscar nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress, an award I think she should have won. There is an underlying sadness to the performance as we watch Wood do two particularly moving scenes involving water, one in a bathtub and one in a river, which Wood completely invests in, despite her lifelong fear of water and the way the actress eventually died. A film classic that should not be missed. Remade as a TV movie by NBC with Melissa Gilbert as Deenie.