#222
SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS
One of Kazan's last great movies.. Instead of giving a synopsis of this movie, I try to tell an audience what I experience when I saw this and any bits of information related.. When I first saw this, I liked it very much. The second time I saw this I was living with this woman (who used to be my next-door neighbor) while the house I used to live was supposedly being worked on. I was in Australia for months, and when I found out the house was available after the previous tenants moved out, I thought, "OK, I'll go back to the US".
It's a movie about sexual repression, and the woman I saw this with was definitely repressed. She worked for the city, and so she came home around the same time every day, at about 5:15 (cue the horns - Who reference) so I hit pause to see if she'd indulge me and watch this with me. She liked it a lot. It's unfortunate, because she died suddenly the same day I became an uncle. And back to sexual repression, she would talk about spending the night with me, but then kinda back off, and then say how nice it would be to sleep together, and then kinda back off after saying, "Only sleeping, right?". Finally I showed her my displeasure because she played this game, on a labor day weekend when I spent ALL of it helping her move heavy boxes into her garage (I moved, she "directed"). So I finally replayed the scene, and she said, "I was telling myself" - why repress yourself? (This happens in the movie, and is a reason for Natalie Wood's breakdown, and what-ifs). I'm still kicking myself today, thinking, "Well, I can't ever have sex with her" but also wondering how it would change our "relationship", because sex always does. Although she was short, she had this tough exterior, and wished she would have shown more of her tenderness. As a wise man once said, "A woman who demands her equality renounces her superiority".
Anyway, this is a damn good movie about things I mentioned above, except the fact they were young high school sweethearts. And nobody knows how Natalie Wood died... Maybe. Maybe not.