Picnic

Joshua Logan (1955)

Joshua Logan directed William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play on Broadway.  Daniel Taradash’s screen adaptation is uneven and the movie is sometimes bewildering but it is, to Logan’s credit, for the most part a movie and not a play on film.  This isn’t the case at first – there’s lots of talk and plenty of overacting in and around the Owens family home as they and their neighbours prepare for the annual Labor Day picnic.   The picture first starts to move when Alan Benson, the well-off beau of the elder Owens girl Madge, takes his former college friend, Hal Carter, to the site of the Benson family business, owned by Alan’s father.  Hal, now a drifter in need of a job, has arrived in town that morning in the back of a freight train.  The scale of the factory seems huge and the two young men’s ascent up the grain elevators which dominate it has a disorienting effect, increased by the relatively static quality of what’s gone before.   The highlight of Picnic, though, is the picnic – not only as a piece of finely-orchestrated social description but as an opportunity for the principal characters, taking a short break from the tortured centre of the drama, to behave in this public setting – blending in with and standing out from it.  We see a talent contest, choral singing, cherry-pie-eating and blowing-up-balloons competitions; Logan cuts to babies burping or crying at what’s on offer, and to the many amazing adult faces in the crowd.   The time capsule quality of these sequences is very strong in the display of manners good and bad; the huge cakes with their frosted icing; the picnic baskets and a dog rooting around in one of them; the pinks and blues and pale greens of Chinese lanterns and the women’s frocks; the winged spectacles.  The colour (the film was photographed by James Wong Howe) is unusually nuanced and has survived unusually well (though no doubt helped by a restoration job in the 1990s) for a movie of this period.   The crowning of the Neewollah (Halloween backwards) queen and the drift of her swan-shaped boat down the river is bizarre but beguiling.   The Labor Day picnic may have formed the second act on Broadway but Joshua Logan, by building the melodrama out of this vividly staged social ritual, gives it a grounding in a peculiarly theatrical reality.

Elsewhere, and even in the histrionically busy opening sequence, the look of the characters is sharply evocative of time and place (a small rural town in Kansas in the early 1950s).  This, combined with the hyped-up acting and the relentless illustration and explanation of character, gives the piece an almost deranged but intriguing intensity.  Picnic seems an unusually sexual film for the period, in terms of the amount of exposed flesh:  the fact that it’s made permissible by belonging to young people usually engaged in apparently wholesome activity, swimming and diving and so on, doesn’t diminish the sensuality.  Hal’s shirtlessness and his and the various women’s awareness of this is the strongest element in the early scenes.  The casting and playing is chaotic but intriguing.  William Holden is genuinely dynamic as Hal and his slim muscularity enables him to pass for a younger man (Holden was thirty-seven at the time); it’s his essential sanity that makes him seem too old for the part and he’s unconvincing as a blowhard.  (When I tried to think who’d have been right for the part Paul Newman naturally came to mind:  he had ended up playing Hal on stage but hadn’t yet broken through in Hollywood when the film was made.)

Cliff Robertson, although he seems a generation younger than Holden, is good as Alan:  this young man is painfully aware what his stick-in-the-mud father (Raymond Benson) thinks of Madge, and also – this is what’s skilful about Robertson’s playing – less explicitly aware that Madge, played by Kim Novak, doesn’t reciprocate Alan’s feelings for her.  At first and as usual, Novak seems to be in difficulty as soon as she starts speaking her lines but she’s more effective here than in later films – she seems more strikingly beautiful when she’s not so glamorised by the director.  Kim Novak always gives the impression of discomfort at being expected to do something – acting – that she’s not really capable of.   Here, this chimes with Madge Owens’ miserable certainty that she can’t be happy with Alan Benson.  Novak’s limitations resurface when the mutual passion between her and Hal takes off – but her dancing bit works, and her underpowered playing is at least distinctive in this company.   Betty Field, so over the top in 7 Women which I saw just a week or two before watching Picnic on television, gives depth to the anxiety and dissatisfaction of Madge’s mother.  As the other daughter, Millie, Susan Strasberg is sometimes overemphatic but there’s real feeling there too.

The weirdest performance is from Rosalind Russell as the spinster schoolteacher Rosemary Sydney – she does enough acting for ten but the overplaying is often highly enjoyable.   Russell’s charisma makes the character hard to read, though:  her Rosemary is so attention-grabbing from the start that the sense of different, more desperate aspects of her personality emerging as the picnic goes on is somewhat lost – Russell’s power makes Rosemary’s turning on Hal vicious rather than in any way saddening.  It’s remarkable, though, how she sustains the intensity of her acting in the gruellingly extended scene in which Rosemary repeatedly begs her social partner, the pusillanimous store-owner Howard Bevans, not to leave her.  Arthur O’Connell as Howard is the only survivor of the Broadway cast and it’s one of those turns which, though effective enough, feels like it was worked out many stage performances ago.  Verna Fulton plays the Owens’ next door neighbour, an old woman who has an invalid mother.  The latter is unseen but it’s hardly surprising, given how vocally powerful all the women except Kim Novak are, that she calls out in such good voice, despite her great age.  The effective melodramatic score is by George Duning.  William Inge’s renderings of sexual loneliness now seem dated and forced but Picnic, at this distance in time, is nevertheless fascinating.

10 August 2013