Picnic

Picnic Review

I first saw this movie as a teenager in the 1950's and remembered it fondly. Watching it again fifty years later and reading a number of reviews of both professionals and multiple viewers, it seems to me that many are missing the entire point of Inge's play and the movie. While the music score, the melodrama, and over-the-top-acting, especially by Holden, certainly make the movie look dated, there is great irony in the contrast between the carefree, fun, happy atmosphere of the Labor Day picnic and the anguished lives of a mother whose husband left her to raise two unhappy daughters, a spinster whose entire life appears to have been spent caring for her aging mother, a love-starved schoolteacher who is terrified of living her own life out as a lonely old maid, and especially Hal, the child of a broken home of an alcoholic father and an unloving mother who was abandoned by both parents in his teens and who has come to the realization that there is no future in store for him. Real life is not a picnic.

Picnic Feature

• HOLDEN/NOVAK

Picnic Overview

Drama on the impact of a virile, egotistical drifter on the lives of 5 women in a small Kansas town.

Picnic Specifications

William Holden is the hunky drifter who rides the rails into a small Midwest town with dreams of landing a "respectable" job with his rich college buddy (Cliff Robertson). Kim Novak is the small-town beauty queen engaged to Robertson who falls for the cocky dreamer, as do repressed schoolmarm spinster Rosalind Russell and Novak's tomboyish kid sister Susan Strasberg. Their unleashed passions reach a crescendo at the Labor Day picnic.

Joshua Logan directed William Inge's play on Broadway and carried it to Hollywood, earning Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Director in his screen-directing debut. Holden is years too old for the role but oozes sex appeal and makes a swoony stud when he takes his shirt off (or when, better yet, it's ripped from his back by a boozing Russell), and Novak is a lovely lost girl yearning for something she can't quite grasp. Arthur O'Connell earned an Oscar nomination as Russell's tippling boyfriend. The film was a huge popular and critical hit, but Logan's stiff and strident direction hasn't dated well. He makes his points in big capital letters--subtlety was never his strong point--and loses the natural beauty of the Kansas locations when he takes the climactic picnic scenes into an obviously artificial soundstage. Picnic remains a loved American classic, largely for Holden's tough-guy vulnerability and James Wong Howe's brilliant widescreen color photography. --Sean Axmaker

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