Splendour in the Grass … comes from the canvas-backed chair of Kazan, the typewriter of William Inge and the camera of Boris Kaufman: it is accordingly a very glossy, punchy, expert piece of something or other. Unfortunately, it is also ludicrous. (p. 96)
The end of this packed film (there is an unjustified, recalcitrant air of jumbo novel about it, like Giant) brings together the two kids, now older and saner, in a wistful encounter. They lost that Wordsworthian 'splendour in the grass'—here interpreted as a roll in the hay—presumably for 'strength in what remains behind'…. In ways too devious to recount in full, this long film forfeits seriousness and sympathy by being either too sheerly arranged at crucial times—the girl's parents rocking on the porch in awful symmetry could be advertising anything from bungalows in Los Angeles to a capitalist vodka—or too thunderously repetitious, too Methodic, strenuous and symbolic…. There are large merits, too—a party that snares what one imagines to have been the spendthrift hysteria of the Twenties, superbly photographed in tastefully muted shades of violence…. [However,] the general prettifying and guile detract from belief. (p. 97)
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