eagleblossom First of all, Katherine Hepburn is at her most beautiful, and although the director did not like her costumes (it was too late to change them), her dresses were exquisite.This movie grossed the most of the Spencer Tracey/Katherine Hepburn movies, and the story-line was intriguing.Highly recommend!

Edgar Allan Pooh . . . and the Historical Record shows that SEA OF GRASS director Elia Kazan deserved AT LEAST six or seven hundred Real Life stitches for that many betrayals, back-stabbings, lies, and false accusations during the U.S. Rich People Party's Fascist Witch Hunts conducted by Sen. Joe "Mad Dog" McCarthy, R-WI. They say that it's always hardest to Rat Out your two or three best friends and closest relatives, and after that you want to feel like a Big Man on Hell's Campus by making up Crazy Crap about ANYONE who has ever crossed your path. "Criss Cross," as SEA OF GRASS star Robert Walker always said before Mad Joe's CIA\NSA Black Ops henchmen gave Poor Bob a fatal "drug reaction," making him just one more of Elia's Real Life "Fall Guys" after Kazan cast him as the lead fall guy in THE SEA OF GRASS. Mr. Walker clearly was "Sober as a Judge" working with directing giant Alfred Hitchcock as the star of STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, not realizing that his off-screen doom was sealed four years earlier when he rubbed elbows with Giant Rat Fink Kazan in THE SEA OF GRASS. Double Criss Cross!

amb0120 Why do I get the feeling some folks know little about Spencer Tracy? For example, Kazan's alleged quote of "Tracy did not like horses and horses did not like Tracy either" (per Ciment's book). Excuse me, but how could a man who loved to play polo, which Tracy did and did a lot in his younger days and against studio wishes, not like horses? I've played polo and if you don't like horses (and they don't like you) you won't be playing the game more than once or twice. Maybe the quote was made for the more obvious reason: to justify Kazan turning out a movie that was below his abilities? If true that one of Kazan's excuses for the painful experience of directing the movie was not filming on location, I can't totally disagree, but then again a good many great films were not filmed on location, so this excuse only holds so much water. And how can one think that the movie is a "cattlemen vs. homesteaders" film? That's the setting, and it is the trigger of the conflict between the main characters, which leads to the betrayal, which is the center piece of the story, but that certainly isn't the movie. I grant you, it's not one of Tracy's best, but he does the best he can with the lame Marguerite Roberts' script. Even if this movie had been shot on location, it doesn't change the glaring fact that a bad script is still a bad script. If you believe Tracy was sleepwalking, then you have to also believe Kazan was on life support and Roberts was dead, from the neck up, while scripting this one. If Tracy's at fault for anything, it's for trying to save the film, which is more than it deserved.

bkoganbing Considering that Sea of Grass is helmed by a director who's not familiar with the western milieu it's amazing that it comes off as well as it does. Elia Kazan is so much better in an urban setting like On the Waterfront. Yet Tracy and Hepburn do make this work on some levels.John Wayne in McLintock and Spencer Tracy in Sea of Grass have the same view of the prarie. Both films take the side of the cattle rancher as opposed to the farmer. Certainly other films like Shane make the farmer the good guy. But events here show that Tracy was right about the prarie as his arch rival in politics and love, Melvyn Douglas, ruefully points out.Tracy and Wayne also have spousal problems, although certainly Wayne handles his with a tad more humor. One thing that Maureen O'Hara does and Katharine Hepburn doesn't is share his vision of the prarie. She befriends the farmer family nearby and that is what causes the rift between her and Tracy.McLintock is a comedy and Sea of Grass is a western soap opera. Kazan was lucky in casting folks like Edgar Buchanan and Harry Carey who knew their way around a western. Robert Walker was taking some tentative steps toward a similar role in Vengeance Valley. He only appears in the last half hour of the film as the kid with dubious paternity, but you will remember him.Katharine Hepburn would have to wait another 28 years before doing another traditional western in Rooster Cogburn. Eula Goodnight is certainly light years from Lutie Cameron. Colonel Jim Brewton though is the same type cattle baron as G.W. McLintock.I think the film is more for fans of soap opera than for fans of westerns. And certainly it's for fans of Spence and Kate.