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A thorough education, the camera tilts up a statue of the college's founder to reveal a loaded pigeon perched on his dome. "Alright, alright. What about free love?" The ongoing concern among undergrads, "the biological urge," the opening montage sketches the rituals of necking youth for the benefit of the National Lampoon. The modern coed (Dorothy Wilson) materializes as a beaming apparition while her sophomore beau (Richard Cromwell) tries to hit the books, their extended smooch in the diner's bathroom provides a more tangible encounter. The campus swain (Eric Linden) sees his roadster as a hotel on wheels, elsewhere the unconsummated romance of professors (John Halliday and Aileen Pringle) suffuses the older generation with rue. "You know, you'd be much nicer if you'd loosen your morals." "I would be much more comfortable if you would loosen your grip." Class relations and hormonal peccadillos, a keen Gregory La Cava modulation from frisky drollery to thorny melodrama. The sophomore is fed up with the salacious idée fixe of his colleagues so the waitress (Arline Judge) recommends missionary work, "you arouse my savage instincts." Their woozy dance in her apartment ("Turn off the heat, baby. I haven't got fire insurance") tumbles onto the couch and giggle turns into kiss, her glowering father (Reginald Barlow) has a name for this, "seduction of a minor." Forced marriages and hospital confessions mark the darkening joyride, along the way there's a glimpse of Grady Sutton as an overgrown frat house dweller seeking his polka-dot pants. One character's hopeful conclusion is another's dead end, "so that's what you teach them in college, huh?" Kazan takes stock of the situation in Splendor in the Grass. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |