Plot
1928 Kansas: 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 scion of one of the most 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 disappointed by, and ashamed of, his older sister, Ginny (Barbara Loden), a flapper and party girl who is sexually promiscuous, smokes, drinks, has had an abortion (or as Deanie's mother said "one of those 'awful surgeries'"), and a marriage annulled, so they "pin all their hopes" on Bud, pressuring him to attend Yale University.
Bud does find a girl who is willing to become sexually involved with him; when Deanie is later almost raped by another boy, she is driven close to madness and institutionalized, while Bud never appeals to get professional mental help. Her parents must sell their stock in order to pay for her institutionalization, which they do just before the Great Depression. Bud's family loses its fortune in the Crash of '29, which leads to the father's suicide. Ginny dies in an automobile accident, his mother lives nearby in squalor, and Bud takes up ranching, which he had postponed because of his father's aspirations for him.
In the final scene, Deanie, home from the asylum after two years and six months, goes to meet Bud. He is now married to Angelina (Zohra Lampert), the daughter of Italian immigrants; he and his wife, whom he met while complying with his father's desire that he attend Yale, have an infant child and are expecting another one. After their brief reunion, Deanie and Bud see that they must continue their lives separately; Deanie states she is going to marry a doctor in Cincinnati whom she met at the asylum.
Read more about this topic: Splendor In The Grass
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)