Splendor in the Grass

Warren Beatty couldn't have had a better start to his movie career than this, with collaborators such as co-star Natalie Wood and director Elia Kazan. Beatty and Wood play star-crossed lovers in playwright William Inge's tragi-romantic screenplay, set in a 1920s Kansas that boasts none of the homeliness that Dorothy experienced in The Wizard of Oz. The young couple who spend the film attempting to cross the sexual morality divide are too easily dominated by interfering parents (Audrey Christie, Pat Hingle), so that what should be splendid is seen to be squalid. The psychology may be simplistic, but the powerful portrayals from the cast - especially from Beatty - make that weakness seem like an irrelevance.