Beatty's debut

Film icon Warren Beatty got his acting debut in an Oscar-winning picture. The film was 1961's Splendor in the Grass, winner for Best Original Screenplay (William Inge) and nominated for Best Actress (Natalie Wood).

Beatty plays Bud Stamper, captain of the high school football team and son of a wealthy oilman. Wood plays Deanie Loomis, Stamper's girlfriend. Coming of age in 1920s Kansas, the two must balance their feelings for each other and their burgeoning sexuality against their families' expectations of them and the oppressive morality of their time and place. Class distinctions also come into play, as Loomis is from a less well-off family, and Stamper's father believes that she will drag Bud down. Though Mr. Stamper promises to send Stamper and Loomis to Europe as a honeymoon gift as long as Bud agrees to go to Yale before marrying her, it is clear that he hopes that Bud will find a more appropriate wife in the meantime. He even goes so far as to suggest that Bud find "another kind of girl" to satisfy his urges. Eventually, both Bud and Deanie crack under the pressures that are put on them, as Bud caves to his father's wishes, and Deanie has a nervous breakdown.

Beatty is very impressive in his debut performance, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that repressed, uptight Bud Stamper is so different from the womanizing playboy type that defined so much of his career. But the film really belongs to Natalie Wood. She is entirely convincing and heartbreaking as a young woman who, caught between her feelings and her desire to be a "good girl," between her love for her boyfriend and her wish to live up to the unfair expectations put on her by the society in which she lives, breaks under the pressure, and is then deprived even the "comfort" of madness, as her parents insist that nothing is wrong with her, even as they continue to insist that she is still their baby, their little girl.

Splendor in the Grass came at an interesting time for Hollywood. Its story of repressed sexuality and oppressive mores came at a time when Hollywood itself was just beginning the fight to break away from oppressive censorship, to begin to deal with sexuality and other adult themes in a more realistic manner. Films like this one broke new ground, made possible everything that was great about the Golden Age of Hollywood that took place in the 1970s.

Movie trivia question: What is the most recent G-rated movie to win the Oscar for Best Picture?