Ode

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting."

(Wordsworth, "Ode: Imitations of Immortality")

Last night, after an exhausting day, I came home with a meal prepared by Whole Foods and a bottle of sorghum beer.  I sat down alone in front of the television thinking to watch the news, but that was spoiling my appetite, so I switched over to TCM and caught the very beginning of "Splendor in the Grass."  Oh my.  I can't believe I've never watched this movie before.  I know, I know.  I'll take the beating for that one.  Such a tremendous film.  What can I tell you?  What can I say?

Elia Kazan, of course.  I didn't know he directed it.  You can barely ever go wrong watching one of his films.  And everyone in the cast was dead on perfect.  Pat Hingle as Ace Stamper--well, I grew up loathing such characters, people without enough redeeming qualities to inspire sympathy of any sort.  Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood.  

But the treats for me were Barbara Loden, Zohra Lampert, and Jan Norris.  Jesus.  Why didn't they all become stars?  Zohra Lampert turned me upside down with that crazy dialect and quirky way of moving her head.  I could watch home movies of her just walking around the house.  Barbara Loden was married to Kazan, but she didn't have much of an acting career which seems criminal.  And Jan Norris just disappeared, I think, after playing "the other kind of girl" so spectacularly.

I loved the classroom scenes, the old blackboards and the school marm teaching literature to high school seniors.  Martine Bartlett.  Perfect.

Warren Beatty collapsing from repressed desire.  The old doc giving him injections of iron and sessions with a sun lamp.  Natalie Wood going to an insane asylum because her love takes his father's advice and makes love to "the other kind of girl."  Just "the other kind of girl" is enough.  Masks.  Denials.  Victorian values.  Melodrama.  I just haven't seen all that for so long.

Maybe you must be from a world where such archetypal characters existed, when choices were not as varied or extreme.  Maybe you had to grow up in a small town where everyone knew and feared the county sheriff.  I'd like to watch this film with a bunch of high school seniors to watch their reaction.

Or maybe not.