Richie-67-485852
Good movie to visit with your youth and high school days even though this takes place in the early 1900's it still helps to bring back the memories for the viewer. Quality acting and realistic story of life for teens in a simple town some where in the USA. The story has a sensuous undertone and feel as we watch hormones go to work but never really finding closure. The emphasis at that time in that place was being a good boy and girl and if you were not you were known for that too. The movie brings in the crash of 29 and how it changed lives as well as having all that life can offer and not being happy. Wholesome down to earth scenes of family dinners, dances, gatherings and some high school thrown in. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may for time old time is still a flyin for this same flower that lives today tomorrow will be dying applies here...
amosduncan_2000
While a modest hit and the bringer of a career Oscar for Inge, "Splendor In The Gas" in fifties social relevance drama running on fumes; a picture that labors mightily to be a little moving. Beatty is fine in his first film, it was probably enough to make him a star. Natalie Wood is caught straining, too little is given her wild mood swings in the way motivation. Pat Hingle is method hammy in the most one dimensional of the film's characters. The films last quarter, where the cliche's are given some balance (though we learn the two worst have predictably perished by their own folly) and the pain is reconciled, is probably it's best. The poetic coda is too trite but does not offend. Kazan would never find his way into the sixties, and while some misbegotten projects would follow, he was finished as a creative force. His capitulation with HUAC left him something of a pariah in Hollywood, but he never found a real handle on the medium beyond brilliantly executing the written word, and the medium was going beyond that.
clanciai
The amazing thing about each and every film directed by Elia Kazan is what he gets out of his actors to make them perform better than in almost any film by any other director. He must have been the most knowledgeable person instructor ever in films. Here it is worth while concentrating on watching the performance of Natalie Wood especially in the first crisis scenes. There is nothing like it in film history - the extreme sensitivity, the close-up following of her mind, how he lets the camera wander as she gropes her way through a reality that has become her enemy, her questioning looks, her invisible but extreme terror - he catches all this on film, and no wonder she was after this film given the role of Maria in "West Side Story". The film is all hers, he has given it to her almost like a personal offering, while Warren Beatty in his first major appearance is no more than what he is intended to be - almost a helpless dummy. When Natalie gets affected he is at a total loss and can't handle any emotionalism at all, while all he can do is to escape into the arms of another as an abject coward, which is what he does, leaving Natalie stranded in her emotional psychosis, like watching a drowning victim out there in the storm from the shore and doing nothing. His father, on the other hand, is another extremely remarkable performance, he overacts from the beginning and keeps overacting and even worsening it until the end, and he is the real tragedy of the story - like his son, he doesn't understand anything and least of all what is right. It's a simple story about the first love of youths and how it must burn you, it always does, but Elia Kazan's treatment of it turns it into a tremendous heart-breaker. And it's the same with every film by him - he turns his actors into more than just living, burning, and self-consuming people but toweringly passionate, and more alive, convincing and sympathetic persons than if they were real.
grantss
An okay, but not great, drama. While it tackles a few interesting themes - love, insanity (and how they're related...), domineering parents, independence - it just feels choppy in its storytelling. The pacing just feels uneven, and some of the themes not fully developed. The movie also seems to run out of steam at a point.This is in part rescued by the great performance by Natalie Wood (which got her an Oscar nomination) and the solid performance by Warren Beatty, in the lead roles. This was Beatty's big screen debut.Support is a bit hit-and-miss. Pat Hingle is incredibly irritating as the overbearing father. One could blame the writer or director for that, but he seemed way over-the-top.
AD
