Love in Kazansas

Splendor in the Grass (Warner). Director Elia Kazan, who for about 20 years has exerted a powerful but often Freudulent influence on the art and ethos of the U.S. stage and screen, is a man who believes that every slice of life is a Wiener Schnitzel. The theory works pretty well with the plays of Tennessee Williams, which Kazan perennially directs, because most of Williams' characters are merely engaged in a morbid game of tag your id. It works less well with the plays of William Inge, which Kazan occasionally directs, because most of Inge's characters have the sort of spiritual problems that the papa of psychiatry did not really understand.

In this picture--which was written by Inge but heavily edited and then directed by Kazan--a relatively simple story of adolescent love and frustration in a small Midwestern town has been jargoned-up and chaptered-out till it sounds like an angry psychosociological monograph describing the sexual mores of the heartless heartland.

In the film's first scene, the teen-aged hero (Warren Beatty) and heroine (Natalie Wood), a couple of nice kids from Kazansas, are shown in cinema's stock petting situation. Later that night the heroine's stupid, insensitive, greedy, cunning, smarmy, gabby, hypocritical, vicious and even fat old slob of a mother (Audrey Christie), a living list of everything lousy that has ever been said about womanhood, reads her daughter a puritan's primer of sexual misconceptions: "Boys don't respect a girl they can go all the way with. Anyway, no nice girl has those feelings."

Meanwhile the hero's stupid, insensitive, greedy, cunning, loudmouthed, backslapping, drunken and even crippled slob of a father (Pat Hingle), the all-American marketype of the guy with the big business and the teentsy soul, reaches down to the bottom of his heart and comes up with a moldy collection of pragmaterialistic cliches: "Son, don't you go too far with that girl. If she gets pregnant, you'll have to marry her and then you couldn't go to Yale. What you need--heh, heh--is another kind of girl on the side."

Intimidated by these and other horrible examples of the small-town attitude toward sex and life, the hero and heroine stop petting and finally even stop seeing each other. Now according to Freud, the repression of sex can cause all sorts of unpleasant symptoms. So the hero promptly comes down with pneumonia, while the heroine gets the screaming meemies and tries to drown herself. In the end, though, her balance is restored by a nice friendly old Freudian psychiatrist.

The show, of course, is slick, exciting, professional in every detail--trust coony old Kazan for that every time. Actress Wood is quietly adroit and appealing. And Actor Beatty, who at 24 is playing his first screen part of any account, should make the big time on the first bounce. In the matter of talent, Sister Shirley MacLaine can give him cards and spades, but he has a startling resemblance to the late James Dean, and he has that certain something Hollywood calls star quality.

The script, on the whole, is the weakest element of the picture, but Scriptwriter Inge can hardly be blamed for it. "I hate a play," he once remarked, "that tells me what to think." He must hate this one.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.