Splendor in the Grass

Until the 1950s, Hollywood located licentiousness and temptation in big cities and foreign countries, while assuming the essential purity of the American small town. Films like Some Came Running and Rebel Without a Cause started finding hypocrisy and repression in the small towns and suburbs decades before David Lynch. If Elia Kazan’s 1961 Splendor in the Grass isn’t the best of the bunch, it’s probably the most cynical and heated—the air is thick with repressed sexuality. Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty play ridiculously beautiful teenagers in 1928 Kansas who resist screwing to mollify their parents. Naturally, it leads to hysteria, suicide attempts and rampant flapperism. It’s an expertly crafted soap opera, although the last act drags.