The American movie titled Splendor in the Grass and directed by Elia Kazan was released in 1961 and is categorized as drama.
Key cast members of Splendor in the Grass include Warren Beatty, Natalie Wood, Barbara Loden.
The plot of Splendor in the Grass is: In Kansas in 1928: Wilma Dean "Deanie" Loomis (Natalie Wood) is a teenage girl who follows her mother's advice to resist her desire for sex with her boyfriend Bud Stamper (Warren Beatty), the son of one of the more prosperous families in town. In turn, Bud reluctantly follows the advice of his father Ace (Pat Hingle), who suggests that he find another kind of girl with whom to satisfy his desires.
Bud's parents are ashamed of his older sister Ginny (Barbara Loden), a flapper and party girl who is sexually promiscuous, smokes, drinks, and has recently been brought back from Chicago, where her parents had a marriage annulled to someone who married her solely for her money. Rumors in town, however, have been swirling that the real reason was that she had an abortion. Being so disappointed in their daughter, Bud's parents "pin all their hopes" on Bud, pressuring him to attend Yale University. The emotional pressure is too much for Bud, who suffers a physical breakdown and nearly dies from pneumonia.
Bud knows one of the girls in high school, Juanita (Jan Norris), who is willing to become sexually involved with him, and he has a liaison with her. A short time later, depressed because of Bud's ending their relationship, Deanie models herself after Bud's sister Ginny. At a party she attends with Toots Tuttle (Gary Lockwood), another boy from high school, Deanie goes outside with Bud and makes a play for him. When she is rebuffed by Bud, who is shocked because he always thought of her as a "good girl," she turns back to Toots, who drives her to a private spot by a pond that streams into a waterfall. While there, Deanie realizes that she can't go through with sex, at which point she is almost raped. Escaping from Toots and driven close to madness, she attempts to commit suicide by jumping in the pond, being rescued just before swimming over the falls. Her parents sell their stock to pay for her institutionalization, which actually turns out to be a blessing in disguise, because they make a profit prior to the Crash of '29 that leads to the Great Depression.
While Deanie is in the institution, she meets another patient, Johnny Masterson (Charles Robinson), who has anger issues targeted at his parents, who want him to be a surgeon. The two patients form a bond. Meanwhile, Bud is sent to Yale, where he fails practically all his subjects. While at school, he meets Angelina (Zohra Lampert), the daughter of Italian immigrants who run a local restaurant in New Haven. In October 1929, Bud's father travels to New Haven in an attempt to persuade the dean not to expel Bud from school; Bud tells the dean he only aspires to own a ranch. While Ace is in New Haven, the stock market crashes, and he loses everything. He takes Bud to New York for a weekend, including to a cabaret nightclub, after which he commits suicide. Bud has to identify the body.
Deanie returns home from the asylum after two years and six months, "almost to the day." Ace's widow has gone to live with relatives, and Bud's sister has died in a car crash. Deanie's mother wants to shield her from any potential anguish from meeting Bud and so pretends to not know where he is. When Deanie's friends from high school come over, her mother gets them to agree to feign ignorance on Bud's whereabouts. However, Deanie's father refuses to coddle his daughter and tells her that Bud has taken up ranching and lives on the old family farm. Her friends drive Deanie to meet Bud, at an old farmhouse. He is now married to Angelina, dressed in plain clothes, they have an infant son named Bud Jr., and Angelina is expecting another child. Deanie lets Bud know that she is going to marry John, who is now a doctor in Cincinnati. During their brief reunion, Deanie and Bud realize that both must accept what life has thrown at them. Bud says, "What's the point? You gotta take what comes." They each relate that they "don't think about happiness very much anymore."[2]
As Deanie leaves with her friends, Bud only seems partially satisfied by the direction his life has taken. After the others are gone, he reassures Angelina, who has realized that Deanie was once the love of Bud's life.[2] Driving away, Deanie's friends ask her if she is still in love with Bud. She does not answer her friends, but Deanie's voice is heard reciting four lines from Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality": "Though nothing can bring back the hour/Of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower/We will grieve not; rather find/Strength in what remains behind.".
