The “beautiful, tragic, sad” movie Bill Paxton called the greatest he’d ever seen
Gone too soon, Bill Paxton was a tremendous actor of great range, and showed willingness to make all sorts of films.
The phrase ‘character actor’ is often used to describe performers whose roles are so eclectic that they can play all sorts of characters under any set of circumstances, and few actors fit that description quite as well as Paxton, whose roles were so vast and unique that he commanded the respect of nearly everyone he worked with.
Given the sheer number of directors that Paxton worked with and the many masterpieces he’s appeared in, it should come as no surprise that he was a big fan of classic films. While anyone who’s taken the most basic of film classes could list off beloved Old Hollywood titles like Citizen Kane, The Searchers, Casablanca, and On the Waterfront, Paxton’s taste proved to be more unique, for when asked about the films that mean the most to him, he named the 1961 drama Splendor in the Grass.
“It’s a great unrequited love story written by the great playwright William Inge and directed by one of the masters, Elia Kazan,” Paxton said, adding, “It had Natalie Wood, who I was just crazy about, and a young Warren Beatty. Plus, it’s a beautiful, tragic, sad story.”
Splendor in the Grass was one of the most progressive coming-of-age films ever made, exploring the pressures teenagers are under due to strict societal standards, and it marked Beatty’s onscreen debut, featuring a performance so charismatic that it’s easy to see how he became one of the biggest movie stars in the world within the New Hollywood era.
While Wood had already been praised as a great child star, Splendor in the Grass proved she was capable of taking on more mature material, and earned herself an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actress’.
Kazan is a filmmaker who originated on the stage, and thus had a means of creating realism on sets that mirrored that of a live performance. In Paxton’s eyes, his brilliance was most apparent within the beautiful way that the film was wrapped up.
“The end is killer,” Paxton said, “She goes to visit him, and his new wife looks just like her. The kid is on the floor playing with the chicken, and you’re thinking, ‘Oh God, why isn’t it their kid. Why is he playing with that chicken?’ She says, ‘Are you happy, Bud?’ He says, ‘I don’t really think about that, Deenie’. Those are the kind of parts I want to do.”
While Paxton is best known for playing wisecracking supporting characters in blockbusters like Tombstone, Aliens, The Terminator, and True Lies, he was also capable of appearing in more romantic roles that were similar in tone to his favourite film, wherein his late career revival came when he starred on the HBO romantic drama Big Love.
It’s clear from the way in which he analysed Kazan’s direction that he understood the filmmaking process in a profound way. It’s something that he was able to prove when he stepped into the director’s chair, most notably with the 2001 psychological horror film Frailty. While flying somewhat under the radar at the time, it has been reclaimed as both a lost masterpiece and one of the most underrated horror classics of the 21st century.
