1955: Picnic

Picnic (Logan, 1955) 7/10

In the 1950's, the influence of the Motion Picture Production Code regulating the content of American films was waning. Foreign imports, the advent of television, social changes and the establishment of independent theatres were among the factors aiding the dissolution of the code's influence throughout the mid-Fifties. Previously restricted in their sexual context and language, the 1950's saw through the release of several films displaying a new openness towards sexual relations and class.

Joshua Logan's 1955 adaptation of William Inge's Pulitzer Prize winning play Picnic is one such example of this movement. Set in rural Kansas, Picnic focuses on Hal Carter (William Holden), a muscular drifter sweeping into the sleepy backwater prairie town via a freight train like a sexual tornado. Desperate for work, Hal aims to track down college fraternity chum Alan Benson (Cliff Robertson), the heir to a fleet of grain silos that dominate the community's economic landscape. Nevertheless, Hal's arrival on the day of the local Labour Day picnic overturns the rigid class and sexual conforms rested within the town.

In particular, Hal's entrance affects a group of single women in a working-class household located near the railroad tracks. Whilst cleaning an elderly woman's yard for food, a shirtless Hal brings out the primal sexual emotions suppressed within the admiring women next door. The release of these inhibited feelings immediately unbalances the cloistered world the rural women reside in: unearthing a volatility and unhappiness previously buried in community life and future goals.

The emergence of a sense of personal fragility and impatience with life brooding throughout the picture coincides with Hal's appearance. Despite her looks and seemingly destined marriage to the wealthy Alan Benson, town beauty Madge Owens (Kim Novak) begins to question her life motives. Ill-educated, the soft-spoken Madge has been contoured by her single mother Flo (Betty Field) to marry Alan as soon as possible, before Madge's beauty and looks fade. With so much attention paid to her appearance, rather than her personality, Madge desires to find someone willing to talk to her as an individual, rather than as a distant goddess.

On the other hand, her bookish sister Millie (Susan Strasberg) is fed up of burying her head in dog-eared Flannery O'Connor novels. She envies Madge's extroverted characteristics and beautiful appearance. Desperate for acceptance and admiration from the opposite sex, Millie yearns to find true love as quickly as possible. An additional woman, the Owen's lodger and local middle-aged school teacher Rosemary Sydney (Rosalind Russell) is equally desperate for love, whether through her incompetent longtime beau stationary salesman Howard Bevans (Arthur O'Connell) or through another man. Feeling her age, Hal's arrival impresses in Rosemary a high-strung need to feel young and sexually vigorous.

Hal however simply wishes to settle down and find some security, at least for the immediate future. After failed stints in college, the army and other ventures, the former college football star yearns to do something meaningful with his life. Yet, through his status as a drifter and the emotions he unleashes, Hal unwittingly commits himself to a program of nomadism. His antics and liveliness are far too out of place in the unyielding and insular world he has briefly immersed into.

By unconsciously releasing these emotions, Hal indirectly tears and gnaws at the regional modes of decorum and restraint; cracking sexual and class conscientious mores. Rosemary and Flo are particularly affected: the former turning into a drunken and embarrassingly over-sexual being, the latter seeing her dreams of climbing the social ladder via her daughter's marriage crumble at every turn.

Upon its initial release, Picnic was seen as a dynamic, erotic and controversial piece of American filmmaking. Today, much of the film's upfront and raw sexuality appears tame. Additionally, Logan's once vaunted documentary-style footage of the picnic itself, now appears clunky, crude and wasteful in its overabundant images of crying babies, three-legged sack races and pie-eating contests that add little to the plot or the Midwest ambience. The film's melodramatic plot appears particularly overblown at times, especially in relating the swiftness of the events within a twenty-four hour period.

Yet, one could argue that Logan's film captured an undercurrent within Middle America during the Eisenhower years. A notable critical and commercial hit during its original run, audiences certainly reveled in the film's uncovering of a simmering sensual identity in a small rural community, as well as the desperation to escape from the placid stillness and unwavering patterns of life in rural life. Thus, the film's portrayal of the four women in the Owens' home is telling as each, prior to Hal's entry into town, is stranded and isolated from fulfilling their own ambitions and establishing their own identity separate from the expected socio-cultural standards of the period.

Kim Novak's muted performance as Madge displays a woman lacking any personality created from within herself; rather she appears as a composite of the expectations of others. Rosalind Russell's work as Rosemary vaults through a tidal wave of emotions, ascending and descending from highs and lows with a rapidity significantly entwined to her character's heart-breaking inability to accept a life without marriage. Along with Susan Strasberg and Arthur O'Connell with their respective portrayals of an introverted teenager and a bumbling salesman, Russell offers one of the film's strongest performances. William Holden's effort however is more troubling. Despite his talent, Holden at age 37 was too old to truly convince in the role, a fact the actor later himself admitted. Nevertheless, his combative performance offers a template for his far more successful work in David Lean's Bridge On The River Kwai two years later.

Transcending from smoldering sensuality to overblown histrionics, Picnic rests as an astute encapsulation of Hollywood cinema during the 1950's. Controversial in a conservative era, Picnic appears today more as a document of an era, than a progressive cinematic work. Picnic was one of Joshua Logan's first entries into the world of cinema after a prolonged period as a director on Broadway. Logan's primary experience in theatre lends the film a deep sense of theatricality that seeps into the work, resulting in some overdone performances and choppy editing by editors William Lyon and Charles Nelson. Thankfully, this is for the most part saved through some beautiful compositions by famed cinematographer James Wong Howe's and the film's melodramatic insights into sexuality in 1950's Middle America.

* Picnic is available on DVD through Columbia Home Video

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque