From the 1950s: Picnic

1955 Romance Drama

From Columbia Pictures

Directed by Joshua Logan

Starring

William Holden

Kim Novak

Rosalind Russell

Betty Field

Susan Strasberg

Cliff Robertson

Arthur O'Connell

Verna Felton

Nick Adams

Reta Shaw

Elizabeth Wilson

Picnic is the screen adaptation of William Inge's Pulitzer Prize-winning play about the sexual tensions rumbling under the surface of a small Kansas town.  It centers around the town's Labor Day picnic and the handsome drifter who appears to shake things up.  The Broadway play originally starred Ralph Meeker, Janice Rule, Kim Stanley and Paul Newman.

Columbia bought the movie rights for $350,000 and made sure its publicity machine put out breathless daily reports of everything it expected the public would want to know.  Apparently none of the four Broadway principals was deemed suitable for the silver screen and they were replaced by Holden, Novak, Strasberg and Robertson.  Josh Logan would direct the film version as he had the Broadway play.

American moviegoers were hot to see the film because there was the promise those sexual tensions would fly between two of Hollywood's most beautiful people.  No one ever doubted the film would be anything but a screaming success.

In the early morning of the picnic, the town is fluttering while getting ready for the big event that will virtually bring out every resident.  Pies are about to come out of ovens, cakes are being frosted, drinks are being loaded into coolers, hair is being combed over and over again and the lovely summer dresses are ready for pretty girls to step into.

Getting off a freight car is Hal Carter (Holden), a former football hero and brief movie actor and current drifter (or bum as his detractors call him) who plans to look up an old college chum, Alan Benson (Robertson), son of the richest man in town.  Hal hopes he can count on the old friendship to get him a job in the family's grain elevator business.

Before the friends can meet, Hal stumbles onto the properties of two neighbors.  One is Helen Potts (Felton) who, though old enough to be his mother, looks him up and down and offers him breakfast.  In turn he offers to clean up her yard.

While doing so, he spots the neighboring Owens family.  Flo (Field) runs a boarding house with old maid schoolteacher Rosemary Sydney (Russell) as the star boarder.  Flo also has two daughters, Millie (Strasberg), brainy but an unpopular tomboy, and Madge (Novak), the prettiest girl in town but dumb, according to Millie.  The sisters don't get on.  All the women in these two homes certainly have a reaction to meeting the shirtless Hal.

Alan is thrilled to see Hal (Alan's father less so) and they visit the top of a grain elevator overlooking the entire town.  Hal lays out to Alan what's he's looking for... a nice little office where I can have a sweet little secretary and talk over the phone about enterprises and things.  Alan, laughing, says he can have a job but he'll have to start at the bottom.

Alan gets Hal some appropriate picnic-going clothes and they arrive back at the Owens home to load the cars with goodies.  Flo notices Madge eyeing Hal and reminds her that she needs to redirect her attention to the richest boy in town who can give her everything she's ever dreamed about rather than a drifter.  Neither knows that Hal plans to stick around.  Alan accompanies Madge to the festivities and Hal takes Millie.

A secondary focus is on Rosemary and her beleaguered beau Howard (O'Connell, who was in the play).  Rosemary is a most unhappy lady, mostly over her old maid status.  She and Howard get drunk at the picnic and all her demons come spilling out.  Of course she wants to marry Howard and she henpecks him to death.  He loves her but doesn't want to get married but by the film's end, she has her way.

The majority of the movie, of course, takes place at the picnic.  Scenes mainly focus on Hal and his noisy, childish posturing as he performs for the people with whom he's attending and most especially for young Millie, although she acts more adult than he does.

Hal doesn't pay a great deal of attention to Madge until he sees her all dressed up floating on the lake in a swan boat as the queen of the picnic.  It is when they engage in a dance (the most famous scene in the film) that Hal realizes she is the girl for him.  However, Alan watches their intimacy and fumes, calling Hal out in front of the others for being the bum he is.

Hal runs to Alan's convertible with Madge trailing behind.  They go to a secluded spot where she tries to calm his tattered nerves.  He knows his chance of living and working in the town has been lost.  After she does all she knows how to do to build his confidence, they become lovers.

Hal knows he needs to leave and prepares to leave Madge behind.  He is going to get a job as a hotel bellman in Tulsa.  He hops the freight train again.  Madge is sad and has some decisions to make.  Her mother implores her to marry Alan but she bids farewell and catches a bus for Tulsa.

Much was made about the casting of Holden, chiefly because at 37 he was considered too old for the part.  Interestingly, he didn't want to make the film either because he was being paid a low salary as part of his final film on his Columbia contract.  But the studio was high on the film and high on Holden.  His last five films-- Executive Suite, Sabrina, The Country Girl, The Bridges at Toko-Ri and Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing-- were financial successes and it was expected that Picnic would follow suit.  And it certainly did.  The publicity surrounding it got so strong that Time Magazine put Holden on its cover.

Holden, however, had a bigger gripe than the salary.  He would have to dance.  It was not a simple dance either.  He would have to perform in the manner of being a showoff and he was petrified.  At the same time he would have to exude strong sex appeal.  Novak was nearly as uncomfortable as he was.

Choreographer Miriam Nelson (and ex-wife of dancer Gene) was hired to teach the two stars how to dance.  She speaks of them and the making of Picnic in her autobiography My Life Dancing with the Stars.  Novak, as stated earlier, was shy and inhibited, two traits not recommended for dancers, and Holden was stubbornly resistant to learning the dance.  

Nelson had a devil of a time... and you know what?  It shows.  Novak looks as though she's concentrating very hard and looks not a bit relaxed and Holden is just plain clunky.  I don't know what Nelson taught them on the actual dance steps because her success is not apparent.  However, I did find it to be sexy, especially when Novak comes down the stairs clapping her hands (which she struggled to time with the music).  Watching the dance years later makes me wonder what in the hell all the excitement was about.

Outside of his youthful films, I don't think Holden ever gyrated so wildly, talked so much or did such silly things.  He is trying to impress the new folks, some of whom were already impressed with his looks, but to me the actor (rather than the character) needed some restraint.  He looked terribly uncomfortable in the role... as did his leading lady.

Holden and Novak

Holden didn't care much for Novak.  He had a special fondness for many of his leading ladies but she landed in the dump heap along with Jennifer Jones and June Allyson and a few others.  Novak's nervousness and hesitancy drove him crazy.  He had offered to help her but she declined.  She wouldn't join others when they got together at night in their hotel, instead choosing to pray nightly at the local Catholic church.  She'd be better off, he grumbled, if she spent more time learning her lines and less time reciting her rosary.

Given that Hal is supposed to arrive in town and unsettle all the ladies, what was the need to shave Holden's quite hairy chest?  Oh, I know why but it's just so silly.  Had no one seen A Streetcar Named Desire four years earlier and all the animal lust it brought?  There's so much more that could have been done here and allowing Holden to keep all those hairs is just one of them.

Let me be clear here... whatever I say negative of Holden, I was always looking forward to his next movie.  Sometimes that next movie wasn't that hot but I got to see him again.  All my favorite actors were ones I could count on.  His face was always worth seeing again, I loved his voice, his smile, his impeccable grooming, his easy manner.  

Despite being crippled with shyness, I thought Novak did a commendable job as the town's prettiest inhabitant.  It was neither her best work nor her worst.  She was hesitant to wear a long auburn wig but understood that her modern, short-cropped, purple-blonde do would not suffice.  Dan Taradash, who turned Inge's play into movie material, told Logan to not hire Novak because, though she's utterly beautiful, we cannot risk this huge picture on an amateur actress.  

Logan, however, was unmoved and determined that Novak would play Madge because she understood her and actress and character shared the same shyness and reticence.  Columbia head Harry (the Horrible) Cohn could have insisted on Novak's hiring because she was not only under contract to him but with Rita Hayworth's popularity fading, he thought of no one but Novak.  But Cohn left the decision to Logan.

Logan thought that out of courtesy he should test Janice Rule whom he had directed as Madge on the stage.  He adored her but her test was disastrous and he settled on Novak.  He apparently never changed his mind about selecting her while admitting it wasn't always easy.  Rule and Novak as costars would in three years compete for the affections of Jimmy Stewart in Bell, Book and Candle.  Novak won that, too.

Let me be clear here too.  I was bonkers over Novak.  This was a MOVIE STAR... beautiful, scared, independent, willful and at the time of her early fame an undiagnosed bipolar personality.  She also made some hugely famous and very popular films and then determined she needed her space and lots of animals and bid farewell.  

Russell and O'Connell

They say Roz Russell went all out to play Rosemary.  I'm guessing she saw Eileen Heckert nail the part on Broadway.  But RR wanted it and thought she could bank on being the bigger name.  Going against her was that she'd been toiling for two years on Broadway and not made a good movie in years.  She needed to play Rosemary, unlikeable as she is, because it would require her to dust off her acting chops.  She's very good.  And hey, perhaps Rosemary's bossiness made others think of RR for her next film... Auntie Mame.  And four years later as the bossy mother of Gypsy.

This is one of Betty Field's best and showiest roles.  She'd been around forever as a leading lady in such admired films as Of Mice and Men,  Kings Row, The Southerner and as Daisy in The Great Gatsby.  Still she never gained the success she probably wanted and she turned to television.  When she returned to films it was as a character actress and Picnic was her first outing.  This is a mother who once probably ran off with the wrong man and she didn't want her daughter to make the same mistake.  Field understood pathos as she did in big films such as Grace in Bus Stop,  the tragic Nellie in Peyton Place, as the caustic family friend in BUtterfield 8 and as Burt Lancaster's wife in Birdman of Alcatraz.  

O'Connell, in his quiet, unassuming way, always commanded my attention.  I suspect he understood that acting, good acting, came from something inside.  He was never obvious.  Early on he knew his career would be as a character actor and he became quite a good one.

Picnic is the movie debut of Cliff Robertson although, oddly enough, he played the lead role of Hal in a Broadway production.  He was fine as Alan but it was a role on the smallish side and that character could certainly not compete with Holden's Hal, lest the whole story be out of alignment.  One imagines the problems that would have arisen in this area had Paul Newman inherited the role.

I don't know much about Susan Strasberg.  I know of her acting genes, of course, but I've only seen her in maybe four movies and found her to be competent and rather quiet.  She delivered the right amount of spunkiness here to pull off Millie.  She was offered the part after it was determined that Broadway's fabulous Kim Stanley would not repeat her role.  As one someone said so indelicately, she would look too old in the closeups.

Verna Felton is memorable as the nextdoor neighbor and champion of Hal.  Nick Adams is fun as the horny paperboy.  Reta Shaw and Elizabeth Wilson as Rosemary's teacher friends were also in the Broadway production.

Strasberg, Field and Novak

One night a number of the crew and actors gathered in Holden's fifth floor room... hey, it had the most perks.  They were soon told to leave windows open a little because there has been a tornado warning,  believing cracking the windows would keep the glass from shattering.  What they elected to do was open all the windows as far as they would go.  Most were actually two windows with a frame in the middle.  As soon as they fully opened, Holden raced toward them and dove out one, grabbing onto the frame and swinging back in through the second.  Everyone freaked out and he apologized.  There have been several versions of this episode but this one comes from Miriam Nelson who was in the room.

Of course all movies filmed on location in small towns cause a sensation and the Kansas communities of Hutchison, Salina, Sterling, Nickerson and Halstead were no exception.  All the exterior scenes caused a serious need for crowd control.  Locals were used in the film as extras and they would deliver that Midwestern way that Logan was so anxious to catch.  Around two thousand Kansans showed up for the picnic scenes. During one of them the actors and crew heard another tornado warning... in fact, several of them.  But some of them didn't react quickly enough, including Logan, and they ended up diving into ditches.  The repeated tornadoes and warnings caused Logan to pack up his company and hightail it back to the studio.

Logan, though reviled as a movie director in some circles, was a man whose work I thoroughly enjoyed.  He had a nice but brief run and Picnic was a part of that.  I think it's one of his best films.  He and Inge both had an instinct for working-class people.

I always have to specifically mention cinematographer James Wong Howe's work on films I review.  He was simply the best and he brought Kansas to life...  the land, the structures and the people.  His widescreen photography was considered trendsetting at the time.  Most alluring was the helicopter shot at the end where his Cinemascope cameras pull back to frame the sprawling countryside showing both a train and a bus heading away from town, each with the story's leading characters.

While the film was nominated for six Oscars, it would win for two...  art direction and set decoration and also editing.  Music became synonymous with the movie via two hits, Theme from Picnic and Moonglow.  The latter was written in 1933 but the film revived interest.  

I've always enjoyed Picnic although I can't quite understand its standing back then as such a good film.  Sure it was the middle fifties but I still think they played it pretty safe.  Looking at it today and recalling there was chatter about sex is just so laughable.  However, as a former smalltime Midwestern boy, I think they nailed it.  And they nailed the picnic sequences as well.  I have always thought the people of those times were kind of sad and the story held up a mirror to that.

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