When I was growing up, I can remember my father getting choked up about two things: the whitetail deer he hit while driving home alone one night to our house in Kittanning, Pennsylvania; and any mention of the movie Picnic.
After the deer carcass was hauled to the side of the road and my father finished his drive home and had a glass of buttermilk to calm his nerves and the blood and muck was cleaned off the hood and the car was repaired and winter turned to spring, the whitetail was eventually forgotten.
But Picnic…well, that was another story. My father always remembered Picnic and whenever he mentioned it, there was an unnatural catch in his voice—as if a tiny fish bone had been trapped just north of his esophagus—and his eyes grew vivid and positively misty. These were the secret, adult things we children shouldn’t be allowed to see, except on rare occasions. Moments of lowered defenses, exposed weaknesses.
“Did I ever tell you about Picnic?”
I looked up from the book I was reading. “Yes, Dad. I think you did. Once or twice.” Nonetheless, I closed my book, holding my place with an index finger. I knew what was coming.
His eyes got that look. “Now, Picnic, that was one mighty fine movie. I went to see it in the theaters when it first came out and I remember being struck by how real it was. Just this simple little movie about one day in the life of real people. All these characters come together during a big town picnic and it’s just incredible what happens. Yep,” and now the fish bone was starting to tickle his throat, “that was a perfect movie.”
“Sounds good, Dad,” I mumbled, then went back to my book. At the time, movies about “real people” didn’t hold my interested. I preferred things like Dr. Dolittle or Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
Then, last week—twenty-five years after the last time I heard my father mention Picnic—I was flipping through the TV channels and stopped on American Movie Classics, the second-best* movie channel on the planet.
[*The first is, of course, Turner Classic Movies.]
There, in glorious Technicolor and Cinemascope…A Joshua Logan Film…From the Play by William Inge…PICNIC.
It was as if my father was calling to me through the TV set.
I poured myself a diet Dr. Pepper, grabbed a bag of Cheetos (my idea of a picnic) and settled in to watch.
Two hours later, I sat there, my jaw slack and my Cheetos-stained fingers trembling. What, I thought, what on earth had my father been thinking? Was he deranged? Touched in the head? A closet lunatic all these years?
Picnic was, in fact, a bad movie. Not a Bad Movie like Massacre at Blood Bath Drive-In is a Bad Movie, but a bad movie all the same. To be very fair to my father (and to the members of the Academy who nominated it for six Oscars, including Best Picture), I’m sure many people thought it was a Good Movie when it was released in 1955. Starting with the tagline on the movie’s poster—“From the moment he hit town she knew it was just a matter of time”—Picnic offered the kind of steamy sex you find in plays by Tennessee Williams, the forbidden love that fills the back pages of True Confessions, the bosom-heaving passion you see in From Here to Eternity’s roll on the beach. Pre-nudity, pre-sexual revolution, pre-Temptation Island, sex remained under the covers, behind closed doors and well past the white-picket-fence exterior of middle America. Movies, though they were slowly getting bolder, still could only hint at the Things Adults Knew.
In Picnic, the most erotic moment comes during a fully-clothed dance to “Moonglow” at the titular event.
The dancers are Hal Carter (the “he” of the poster) and Madge Owens (the “she”). But more importantly, they are William Holden and Kim Novak. As the band plays softly in the background, the two dance down by the riverside, their bodies dangerously close. By today’s standards, it’s tame, G-rated stuff. In 1955, it was enough to melt film projectors. “There could be a few ‘raised eyebrows’ among straitlaced patrons at the accent on sex,” is how Box Office Magazine described the movie back then.
But unless you realize that a fully-dressed dance (with no groping and no tongue-kissing) is steamy, Eisenhower-era stuff, then you’ll miss the dramatic impact of Picnic. Inge’s play is all about sex and yearning. It’s brought to the screen by a team of Hollywood players who were no strangers to sex: writer Daniel Taradash (Oscar-winner for From Here to Eternity) and director Joshua Logan (who also directed Inge’s Bus Stop).
And then there’s Holden’s bare chest (rumor has it, he shaved his pecs for this flick). At the beginning of the movie, Hal Carter arrives in town, a drifter riding the boxcars and looking for his old college chum. He’s a restless, turbulent sort of fellow—the kind of hunky young man who can’t stand wearing garments. Sure enough, within five minutes, he’s stripped off his sweaty shirt and is helping kindly old Mrs. Potts burn her trash. The septuagenarian old lady swoons, as does any female who lays eyes on Carter.
Enter Madge Owens (Novak), a restless, turbulent filly living next door to Mrs. Potts. Madge is 19, never been kissed, and wants to get out of town, but fast, daddy-o. She’s beautiful—Hollywood beautiful living in Podunk, America—but doesn’t want to be admired solely for her looks. “What good is it just to be pretty? Maybe I get tired of being looked at,” she complains to her mother, a harried woman trying to raise two daughters by herself. Mrs. Owens has Madge’s life already roadmapped: she will marry Alan (Cliff Robertson) the richest boy in town and will live in luxury (“charge accounts, automobiles, luxury cruises”) for the rest of her life. Madge isn’t so sure, however; there’s just got to be something better out there beyond the limits of Podunk. Her mother simply cannot believe her ears—why on earth would her daughter turn down a country-club life? Why choose to be a have-not when you could be a have just by marrying bland-but-rich Alan?
But she can believe her eyes when Holden sheds his shirt next-door. That’s all she wrote, momma; your daughter’s a goner.
There are plenty of complications. This wouldn’t be the diabolically-tangled 50s drama it is if there weren’t complications. Madge wants a piece of shirtless beefcake; Hal wants a job and some respect (“I just gotta get someplace in this world, I just gotta,” he says through gritted teeth)…but he’s hoping to get that employment from his old college frat brother who, as it turns out, is none other than Madge’s fiancée Alan. Other characters circulating at the edges of Picnic heighten the tension of the day’s events: Madge’s tomboyish younger sister Millie (Susan Strasberg) who longs for beauty and popularity; Rosemary (Rosalind Russell), an old-maid schoolteacher who unsuccessfully hides her alcoholism; and Howard (Arthur O’Connell), Rosemary’s middle-aged beau who can’t decide if he’s ready to commit to the big M.
All the characters and conflicts collide at the annual Labor Day picnic (an event which took place off-stage in the play). Filmed at an actual picnic in a Kansas community, these sequences have a documentary feel to them as Logan and cinematographer James Wong Howe capture the noisy crowds, the three-legged races, the barbershop quartet, the pie-eating contest and the annual crowning of the Queen of Neewollah (“Halloween,” spelled backwards). It doesn’t take a movie genius to figure out which beautiful character is destined to wear the Neewollah crown.
In fact, it doesn’t take much of any kind of genius to figure out where Picnic is heading. Perhaps fifty years ago, people like my dear old Dad might have been gripped by its drama and absorbed in the dashed dreams, the regret, the anguish. Today, the dialogue falls on slightly more hardened ears.
It doesn’t help that the majority of the actors—especially Holden and Russell—read their lines as if they were shouting to be heard above a howling windstorm. Normally, I enjoy Holden’s laid-back cynical style (check out Stalag 17 and Sunset Boulevard for his best work), but very little of that is on display here. From his mouth, lines like these become unendurable: “What’s the use? I’m a bum. She saw through me like an X-ray machine. There’s no place in the world for a guy like me.” Actually, there’s no place in the world for shrill dialogue like that.
And don’t even get me started on Russell’s over-the-top hooting. It’s as if she’s warming up for Auntie Mame.
The one treat at this Picnic is young Susan Strasberg, daughter of the famous acting coach Lee Strasberg. This was the 17-year-old’s first movie role and she commands our attention in every scene she’s in as the smart-mouthed, rebellious teenager who, despite her tomboyish ways, really does want to be a Neewollah queen. Strasberg showed a lot of promise here, but her career never hit the big-time—unlike Novak, who also got her first big break with Picnic (by the way, she later starred in the aforementioned Massacre at Blood Bath Drive-In). Speaking of the cool blonde Miss Novak, there’s really not much to speak of on display here. As Madge, her job is mainly to stand around and “look pretty” (which she does quite well, of course), but the script never allows her to go beyond skin-deep with her character. The anguish and yearning is too restrained, as if Madge is anesthetized and speaking through wads of cotton. As for chemistry between the two “romantic” leads…well, I’ve seen better fizzle by pouring vinegar on baking soda.
I’m still trying to find out what made Picnic so important to its Cold War audiences. A few hours after watching the movie on AMC, I sent an e-mail to my father, giving him the happy news that I’d finally seen his favorite movie, but then apologizing for the fact I hadn’t liked it better and asking, ever-so-politely, what on earth he had possibly seen in it.
He was gracious in his reply: “What I appreciated more than the story itself was the accurate depiction of life in a small town of that era. The town picnic. The bad local band. The silly picnic games people get roped into playing… All of it still evokes a rush of nostalgia.”
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the answer: the sentiment of memory. Even as he was watching it in 1955, my father knew the movie was taking a snapshot of his life and times. However, for today’s viewers, I’d offer these cautions: nostalgia ain’t what it used to be and everything old isn’t new again.
It s Labor Day weekend, and fresh off a freight train is Hal Carter (William Holden), a happy-go-lucky drifter who s looking for a brand new start in ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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