Splendor in the Grass on AllMovie

William Inge's sexual-awakening drama had already been satisfactorily filmed by director Elia Kazan 1961, twenty years before this TV movie made its debut. Melissa Gilbert and Cyrill O'Reilly are not a completely fair trade for the original film's Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty, but the players are game and the results are occasionally worthwhile. The faults lie principally in Inge's dated storyline about a teenaged middle-class "good girl" being seduced by the town's richest boy during the 1920s. The elements of class-consciousness and "retribution for sin" don't play as well in 1981 as they had two decades earlier. Nor does director Richard Sarafian's decision to slavishly follow the Kazan original scene for scene help to make the 1981 version anything of an improvement.