Splendor in the Grass
SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS
Hollywood has never been known for its accuracy about anything, much less historical facts. Amateur historians devote websites to cataloguing movie mistakes (My personal favorite: In TITANIC, Jack tells Rose he went ice fishing in Lake Wissota, but that lake didn’t exist until 1918. Take that James Cameron! If you’d spent some of that money on a fact checker maybe the movie wouldn’t have lost the best screenplay Oscar.)
I find it curious that anybody, even those with lives to kill on the world wide web, would assume that historical films have anything other than a tangential relationship to the time periods they claim to recreate. When a writer or a director overtly acknowledges that he’s using a historical setting to talk about his own present, it’s called an allegory (classic hjgh school example: THE CRUCIBLE, that play that had all those puritans in it but was really about McCarthyism). But "realistic" historical dramas rarely manage to capture anything other than the time that dreamed them. These films may be less conscientious than their politically sensitive cousin, the allegory, but their bumbling, culturally insensitive attempts to make conversation often make more intriguing artifacts.
With this in mind, it is no surprise that SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS tells us far more about the 1960s America that swooned for it than the 1920s America it’s supposed to recreate. READ THE REST HERE