What do you think of the performances in this film...
I'm hearing amazing to not natural.. and fake.
~ I don't find the acting in this movie bad or fake whatsoever. I thought the performances were great. And Natalie Wood blew me away with her outstanding performance.
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I absolutely love this movie and as a big Natalie Wood fan, I would have to say that her performance in SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS was probably the best of her career and she deserved the Oscar nomination she received. Warren Beatty was very good as well, not to mention Audrey Christie as Deanie's mom.
shareand Pat Hingle's great psycho performance as Beattys father...there is an underrated actor for you
shareAs a Warren Beatty fan I'm biased, but he simply made a remarkable debut in this movie with his vulnerable, moving performance as the confused Bud.
shareWood and Hingle should have won Academy Awards. But all the performances were superb. Who thinks otherwise?
shareI think exactly the same. Wood and Hingle are wonderful and Oscar worthy. I think Warren Beatty was fine, but it was the kind of angst=filled performance that Brando, Dean, Cliff and Newman had been giving for a decade, I couldn't buy him as High School kid.
The small parts of Ginny (Barbara Loden) and Angelina (Zohra Lampert) were also wonderfully played, unfortunately they were too small to be considered for Academy Awards.
Absolutely. Pat Hingle gave a phenomenal and ultimately heartbreaking performance. Glad to see someone else mention that.
No, no..."cruelty." I always think that has a nobler ring to it.
The film is dated by dialogue and moral standards. People did not behave this way in '61, or now. The realism of present day cinema wouldn't tolerate this kind of simplistic portrayal of life. But the acting is brilliant. Each character is individually precise and possible, although not collectively.
The movie is a fable. It is also a reaction to 50's conservatism. It is an honest attempt at translating 40's beat culture into a contemporary setting. Highlighting the fight between social rules and individualism that would come to define the 60's, this movie is in turns amazing and irritating. One feels slike slapping the characters and say "You need to think for yourself, not of yourself."
er, ddbbanddtt the film was set in 1929-late '30s. It says its 1929 at the start and it goes for several years including the stockmarket crash. If it were the '50s all the girls would be wearing big hoop dresses and they'd all be driving better cars.
But yes the acting in the film is stilted because it was made in 1961 and this highly stylised form of acting was popular throughout the '50s. Just see the likes of Brando or Dean.
It's a beautiful film all the way around. Four stars for everyone, including the director and the screenwriter.
shareI think the acting is wonderful. I personnally believe that Natalie Wood's performance is one of the greatest of all time. She has so much emotion and she doesn't even have to speak for the viewer to feel her pain. I think it's a wonderful performance.
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Yes, this was Kazan's genious, pulling incredible performances out of people.
maggimae83
One word- Melodramatic.
Although Natalie was not too bad.
Another word-overwrought.But not the actors--
Kazan too often put the actors in dramatic enough scenes snd then wound too tight or too energetic, to where they are not quite comprehensible or real..
The end scene is faultless and perfect.
The delivery is so bad...I'm watching this in psychology class and everyone was cracking up especially at the "ON YOUR FEET SLAVE!" scene. However, we're at the part when Toots...haha...comes over. The movie is getting better in my opinion and I think Natalie Wood plays crazy very well. The movie has some corny ass moments but I attribute that to the fact that it was made in '61.
-- I am a traveler of both time and space, to be where I have been
Natalie Wood doesn't act in period and she does her usual indacting; her best performance was in Bob&Carol&Ted&Alice(69). Pat Hingle and the rest of the adults overdo the hypocritacal repressive monsters: the parents and teachers. Barbara Loden is lively and entertaining as the "bad" girl, but like th film it's cliche. Sandy Dennis and Warren Beatty in their film debuts are rather good.
shareHi brefane,
One of the problems with Splendor In the Grad is that though the overarching plot is about sexual repression it was filmed when the Production Code was very much intact. Kazan and company pounded out the message since they couldn't show it. I also noted that the look was not of the period, except for the cars. the hair and make-up was early 1960s. It's the type of film that should be remade by a cable network like HBO where a producer would be free to explore the themes.
digitaldiva, speaking of the cars, what wasn't authentic was that all the kids in the film seem to have cars. This was Kansas in the 20's! How many cars were there in the US at that time? Car culture didn't start until much later say the 50's and 60's.
shareHi brefane,
Agreed, that bothered me too. These are high school kids - how many of them would have cars? Also the scene in the movie house - I hate to be nitpicky were playing a silent movie from the early 1920s with courtly ladies and gents. The movie takes place in 1929 when half the movie houses in America were already wired for sound. At least show an early talkie or if not, a Clara Bow movie.
When my uncle was in high school in the late 1920s he had a car, and so did many of his friends. When I was in high school in the 1960s I had a car, and so did most of my friends. It was possible for kids to have cars in the old days because we didn't have to have a new or late-model vehicle with the latest smart features and safety ratings. We got hand-me-downs from relatives when they got a new car, or we bought cheap old cars. My dad's first car, when he was fifteen years old in 1940, cost him $15.00. I traded a $75.00 motor scooter for my first car, a run-down old Studebaker. They were jalopies and they broke down all the time. We had to learn how to fix them. It was quite different from today.
It's completely believable that a small town or small city theater in Kansas would still show a silent movie in 1929.