Splendor in the Glass
By today’s standards, it feels like a weird PSA on teenage sex.
It’s a 1960s idea of 1920s values as a very young Warren Beatty tries to fuck Natalie Wood and is getting nowhere to the point where he’s literally getting fatally ill and she ends up going crazy when we tries to get that pussy from somewhere else.
It’s only subtle in how graphic the portrait is. No nudity or strong sexual content, but the movie is masterful in painting the obvious, like when Warren Beaty’s slutty sister in the movie gets sexual assaulted. Well, to be honest by 2016 standards she was sexually assaulted and by 2016 standards it was very subtle, and maybe not by 60s standards.
What’s interesting is how our views on sexuality have changed over the years yet our standards on social status is not. The moment I first saw Beatty’s character, Bus Stumper on the screen I knew his character was stinking rich (His car actually gave it away as we learn at the end of the opening credits it’s 1928 and realistically you’d have to come from cash in order to own them automobiles).
Bud’s father Ace is an overbearing oil barren played by Pat Hingle, who was a generation’s Commissioner Gordon starting with the 1989 Batman. Hingle does a great job at personifying the divide between those who are rich and those who are poor, as he expects to make his son a carbon copy him and is ashamed by his daughter’s wild an fancy free lifestyle . He tries to pressure his son into greatness who only wishes to marry the poor girl played by Natalie Wood, only because that’s how you have sex with girls in 1928 or something (as the movie seems to express). Ace starts to convince Bud that they’re chicks you marry and chicks you…don’t marry( and this is when his girl started to go crazy).
Of course the time span of the film takes us into the Great Depression and we get to see daddy’s downward spiral as he tries to Debye he has a problem.
I feel like the movie does not stand the test of time as it should. Though the acting was great and it was cool seeing the young Beatty, I just feel like it’s content on sex maybe too outdated for the time and age I seen it in.
