Last night I watched Splendor in the Grass and laughed my ass off (okay, not really). Did they not have sex in the 20's? I mean, really. A teen couple want to have sex, their family forbids it, so he collapses from blue balls and she goes to the nut-house. Really??? Did they not masturbate in '28???
Silly movie - supposedly based on a true story.
I was born in 1946,and even then we certainly did not! We attended Church morning and evening three times a week, and what the minister didn't teach us, our mothers did. It is very different these days, very different. Another thing I noticed in the movie was the way we kissed. I had forgotten that. I remember when I first heard about "French kissing". It was years from this movie as I remember. Okay I'm old. I was a freshmen in high school.It was nice seeing this movie again.
shareKind of hard for most to have sex when birth control was hard to get. Grow up.
sharePerfectly good point. This is a big flaw if you're taking the film as realism.
The movies discovered popular psychology in the 1950s and this is very much a 1950's era creation. The popular take on psychological issues at that time is nearly always ludicrously naff (think Rebel Without a Cause or Psycho or Last Summer).
The basic idea here is that teenagers can literally be driven to derangement by sexual frustration. Silly. However, the film is best appreciated on artistic terms rather than as psychological realism. The liberties taken along the way are literary mechanisms simply to set up the highly-charged emotional ending, which is superb.
Of course they flogged it in '28 just like now. But even the best masturbation is just a short-term bandaid, no substitute for actual sex with the person you're in love with.
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