Thursday, July 20, 2017

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:


Wilma Dean: Didn't you ever feel that way about Dad? 
Mrs. Loomis: Your father never laid a hand on me until we were married. Then I... I just gave in because a wife has to. A woman doesn't enjoy those things the way a man does. She just lets her husband come near her in order to have children. 

The insane sexual politics of Splendor in the Grass never fail to amuse me - the utter hysteria that Natalie Wood spirals off into over Warren Beatty's hot cock is the most understandable emotional experience I have ever had in a movie theater. 

This is probably my favorite Wood performance, although I'm not by any means an expert on her - I've seen the seminal roles, the Miracle on 34th Streets and the Searchers and the Rebel Without a Causes, but there are plenty that've slipped by. So here on the 79th anniversary of her birth I ask...

What's your favorite Natalie Wood performance?
.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Splendor in the Grass. I saw it in a theatre in a small town in the south where the entire social life of the town revolved around the Baptist church. As someone just approaching adolescence I totally related to the film even though it wasn't set in the fifties, and the sexual hysteria brought about by "be a good girl" I understood in my core. The movie was profound to me and while it no longer has the impact it did those many years ago it really does hold a special place in my heart when film was a true link to world beyond the one in which I lived.

Anonymous said...

I'm not SPOILED mother! He didn't SPOIL me" This is my favorite scene in my favorite Natalie Wood movie.

MMinDC

Anonymous said...

Louise in Gypsy.

Anonymous said...

Inside Daisy Clover

joel65913 said...

Splendor is her most fully realized performance and she is incredibly raw in it but I'm very fond of her work in Love With the Proper Stranger. But then I love her in Gypsy as well, though she's somewhat eclipsed by Rosalind Russell. Then there's Marjorie Morningstar. Argh! So hard to choose.

My favorite comedy performance of hers though is easy, that would be The Great Race, she's perhaps her most beautiful there and plays her Nellie Bly character with just the right amount of whimsy.

luis pisa said...

Splendor in
the grass

William Donaldson said...

A 1979 TV movie "The Cracker Factory" written by Joyce Burditt, who also wrote "Beaches", with wonderful performances by Perry King and Juliet Mills. No DVD, but I got a VHS copy on E-Bay. If you read the comments on IMDB I am not the only one who loves both the movie and Natalie in it.