OBSESSION 1976

Warning: Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review. Therefore, many crucial

plot points are revealed and referenced for the purpose of analysis. 

It’s Déjà vu All Over Again 

I'm not sure which is worse: being a living, still-functioning film director and having to endure reading about every film school upstart and wannabe hailed as the "new" you, "next" you, or heir to your throne or being a young filmmaker striving to make your mark, only to have your work evaluated exclusively in terms of homage, pastiche, tip-of-the-hat-to, or outright rip-off of an artist you admire.

For as long as I can remember, from Henri-Georges Clouzot (Diabolique) to William Castle (almost everything he's ever done), Alfred Hitchcock has been the go-to comparison name for directors working in the suspense thriller genre. Director Brian De Palma, from the days of his breakout 1972 feature Sisters (whose poster prominently featured the Hollywood Reporter quote: "The most genuinely frightening film since Hitchcock's Psycho!"), has been saddled with—and openly courted—comparisons to Hitchcock.

In our label-centric, brand-driven culture, this certainly makes it easier for critics and studio marketing departments to pigeonhole artists and brand them with an identity, but for film fans, it's all a bit like settling for a tribute band after the genuine article has cut back on touring. You may enjoy how much the tribute band sounds like the original and how it evokes fond memories, but no matter how good they are, they're an imitation. Plus, in focusing so much on how successfully the tribute band has approximated the sound, feel, and experience of the real deal, you never give yourself a chance to appreciate how talented the tribute band is (or isn't) in its own right. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but making do with a copy can sometimes feel like an act of willful self-deception.

As it just so happens, willful self-deception describes both the theme of Brian De Palma's Vertigo-inspired film Obsession and my own personal viewing experience. 

Cliff Robertson as Michael Courtland

Genevieve Bujold as Elizabeth Courtland/Sandra Portinari

John Lithgow as Robert Lasalle

Following on the heels of the sleeper success of Sisters (which openly culled from Psycho, Rear Window, and featured a score by Hitchcock-associated composer Bernard Herrmann) and the undeserved flop of 1974s Phantom of the Paradise (a De Palma departure from type that seized upon the glam-rock zeitgeist mined in 1973s The Rocky Horror Show); the relatively high-profile Obsession gave Brian De Palma his first mainstream commercial success. A modest success, to be sure, but in grossing $4.47 million on its $1.2 million budget, Obsession was a surprise hit. A hit that flew in the face of Columbia Studio's over-cautious distribution strategy. After having sat on the shelf for almost a year after production was completed, the studio tentatively released Obsession with an indifferent ad campaign during the "dog days" of August.

Alas, before Obsession had the chance to build up much steam or word-of-mouth, Carrie, De Palma's second 1976 release, opened in November, its overwhelming critical and boxoffice success (the film grossed $15.2 million against a $1.8 million budget) fairly obliterating Obsession from theater screens, and, until very recently, a great many people's minds, as well.

Florence, Italy 1948

Written by Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver) from a story by Brian De Palma after the two had taken in an L.A. County Museum screening of the then long-out-of-circulation Hitchcock classic Vertigo, Obsession is a romantic thriller about love, loss, grief, guilt, deception, and emotional fixation. Pretty much everything you've come to know and expect from Hitchcock and those who seek to sincerely flatter the Master of Suspense through imitation.

But while Paul Schrader's derivative screenplay borrows copiously from Hitchcock, calling Obsession a romantic "thriller" (the film was promoted with the tagline: "The love story that will scare the life out of you") would be a bit of a stretch. Inarguably romantic in theme and possessed of several intense moments of emotional conflict, anyone coming to Obsession expecting the kind of excesses of violence associated with De Palma after Dressed to Kill or Scarface would do well to be reminded that Obsession is rated PG, and its thrills (mercifully) on the restrained side. So, if I'd have to label it at all (oh, and I do), I'd call Obsession a romantic suspense film or romantic mystery.

Changing Partners
Paul Schrader's original screenplay for Obsession (titled Deja Vu) called for the prescient use of Patti Page's 1953 song "Changing Partners" for this scene in which Michael, Elizabeth, and Amy waltz together at their 10th wedding anniversary party. Perhaps it was initially used and eventually overscored by Bernard Herrmann's sweepingly romantic "Valse Lente" 

The time is 1959. Michael Courtland (Robertson) is a successful New Orleans real estate developer whose beloved wife Elizabeth (Bujold) and 9-year-old daughter Amy (Wanda Blackman) are kidnapped. A botched effort to capture the kidnappers without paying the ransom results in the violent deaths of both wife and child, a tragedy for which Courtland blames himself and is haunted by for years.

A great many of Brian De Palma's by-now trademark stylistic flourishes are in full evidence throughout Obsession. His familiar swirling camera effect is put to particularly effective use in a 360° pan that takes Michael Courtland from grieving widower in 1959 (top) to morose obsessive in 1975.

A broken man consumed with guilt over the role he perceives himself to have played in his family's death, Michael is stuck in 1959 and unable to move on with his life. Even going so far as to thwart the desires of friend and junior business partner Robert Lasalle (Lithgow) by allowing a prime piece of valuable New Orleans real estate to lie undeveloped for the sole purpose of erecting a doleful monument to his wife and child on the site.

In an effort to dislodge Michael from his crippling depression, Lasalle persuades Michael to accompany him on one of his frequent business trips to Florence, Italy. It's there that Michael, while sentimentally/morbidly visiting the church where he and his wife met in 1948, catches sight of an art restorer who (wouldn't you know it) happens to be a dead ringer for Elizabeth. 

Restore the Original or Uncover the Copy?
This is the question - both literal and existential - put to Michael Courtland by Italian-born art restorer Sandra Portinari (Bujold, again) as she preps a Madonna and Child altarpiece by
Renaissance painter Bernardo Daddi. Clues aplenty, folks!

Upon being reassured by Lasalle that the Italian-style doppelganger was no mere hallucination or trick of the brain, Michael, thrown into a tailspin by the uncanny coincidence of locale and resemblance, becomes consumed with the idea that fate has offered him both a second chance at love and a stab at redemption.

Embarking on a whirlwind course of seduction consisting of stalking, persistent courting, and matrimonial proposal, Michael, in due course, whisks Sandra back to his New Orleans home, where whatever remaining line between fantasy and reality can only become even more blurred. And it does.

While awaiting their rushed wedding day, Michael, happy at last, exhibits a marked improvement in disposition and demeanor that his friends and associates interpret (with good reason) as his becoming more detached from reality by the day. Meanwhile, Sandra--ensconced in his shrine-like home and left on her own to study Elizabeth's old photos and diaries for hours upon end--cultivates an obsession of her own. She becomes so immersed in the past life of the dead woman that she begins progressively making herself over in Elizabeth's image.

Love and desire figure into all this somewhere, but it takes a backseat to the morbidity of Michael and Sandra's escalating Folie a Deux: a double-fantasy/shared-delusion speeding headlong on a collision course toward an inevitable, preordained destination...the reenactment and hoped-for reversal of that fateful night that changed Michael's life forever. But can one really repeat the past? And if so, how wise is it to do so?

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I'm not sure if you can make a really riveting film about obsessive love if you approach the material academically. I have no idea what Schrader and De Palma had in mind after they watched Vertigo and struck on the idea to collaborate on a film, but I would hope that each had something particular and personal to say on the topic of love unending that turns into an all-consuming fixation. Not having read the entire original screenplay (said to have included a whole third act, which was jettisoned before filming began), I can only say that the finished movie plays out like the most expensive film school thesis project ever made.

Mind you, I say that not as a put-down, but from the impression I got that Obsession came out of Schrader and De Palma being impressed with Vertigo from an intellectual perspective, not an emotional one. They clearly wanted to try their hand at a similar style of film, but forgot to add either intensity or urgency. Their success in achieving their academic goal impresses me, for Obsession is a fine, handsomely-mounted romantic mystery that does all that I believe it sets out to do. From a filmmaker's perspective, that is. From the perspective of a guy sitting in the audience waiting to be swept up in madness by proxy, Obsession is what I might call a Transfusion Film: it has no blood of its own. 

Sandra immerses herself in Elizabeth's past 

Obsession has all the technical and stylistic pluses of Vertigo, but it lacks the crazy. Michael and Sandra are characters caught up in something neurotic and deeply rooted in pain, but the film kept me at an emotional remove. I don't feel it. I didn't feel any of the eerie undercurrents one would expect from a story this unusual.
Vertigo, for all its late-1950s restraint, is one weird movie. There's a creep-out factor in Jimmy Stewart's portrayal of Scottie's character, which informs his actions. An actor I've never felt comfortable admitting I've never warmed up to (I mean, who doesn't like Jimmy Stewart?), to me, Stewart always came across as disturbed and creepy even when he's supposed to appear normal. 

But Vertigo chiefly benefits from Hitchcock's personal demons and obsessions seeping through the edges of every frame. Hitchcock himself doesn't seem to be aware of it, but by his very treatment of the story, he keeps providing inadvertent peeks into the darkest corners of his own psyche. All of this gives Vertigo that quirky, kinky kick that didn't exactly sit well with audiences in 1958.

On the other hand, Obsession is a meticulously crafted genre film that manages to hit all the right stylistic marks but comes off short by lacking the requisite feverishness of its overheated premise. Robertson's Michael Courtland looks tortured and haunted, but he never seems capable of being out of control. 

Perhaps this is due to the discarded third act, which begins where the current film ends and would have placed the characters in 1985, involving them in a third episode of obsession. Or maybe it's the studio's insistence that the unappetizing incest subtext be removed and reworked through editing (a pivotal scene that was to occur in real life between the characters has been changed into a dream sequence). Whatever the source, there's a big hole at the center of the rather sumptuous package that is Obsession, and it feels like the film functionally sidesteps touching on any aspect of Courtland's passion that intersects with perversion.

Sandra visits Elizabeth's grave

PERFORMANCES

Brian De Palma had this to say about making Obsession in the 2015 documentary De Palma: "I think the weakness of the movie is Cliff and the greatness is Geneviève. I mean, she carries the movie."

Citing Robertson's awareness that Bujold was taking over the film, De Palma states that Robertson resorted to tricks intended to sabotage her performance and that, overall, he found Cliff extremely difficult to work with. Clearly having an ax to grind, De Palma goes on to relate an anecdote conveying his frustration over Robertson -- playing a man who is supposed to look drawn and pale from having locked himself away out of grief -- insisting on applying coats of bronzer to his face. So much so that the cinematographer one day forcibly placed Robertson against the mahogany set, shouting, "You're the same color as this wall! How am I supposed to light you?"

While I don't share De Palma's opinion that Robertson is the weakness of the film (he hasn't much range, but his Michael Courtland is rather heartbreaking), I wholeheartedly agree that without Bujold, I'm not at all certain Obsession would have worked for me at all. A longtime favorite, she is an endlessly resourceful actress of intensity, warmth, and complexity. An intelligent, natural actress like Bujold doesn't have the ethereal vulnerability of Kim Novak, but what she brings to the table is an emotional verisimilitude that does wonders for making the implausible feel real. And in this film, this quality alone is worth a king's ransom. Bujold (as always) is a stunner and gives Obsession its mystery and, ultimately, its poignancy.

In this, the first of three films he would make with De Palma, John Lithgow plays a character described in the script as "The slightly souring cream of the old south." I mention this because, without that knowledge, Lithgow's performance comes off as a tad overripe. Southern accents have to be pretty solid not to sound like dinner theater Tennessee Williams, and if Lithgow's doesn't exactly convince, its inauthenticity fits the potential duplicity of his character. Not helping matters much is that he's also saddled with an absolutely terrible fake mustache (at least, I hope it's fake) and an arsenal of cream-colored suits straight out of Rex Reed's closet. That all of these potential drawbacks more or less work in Lithgow's favor has as much to do with the actor's talent as it does with his character needing to come off as both smarmy and charming in equal measure.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Without a doubt, the most persuasive obsession on display throughout Obsession is Brian De Palma's love of film and reverence for Hitchcock. When it comes to the De Palma arsenal of visual tricks (split screen, swirling camera, weird angles, deep focus through the use of split diopters…), I honestly don't know which are genuinely his or which are attributed to Hitchcock's traditional style. In essence, it shouldn't really matter, but the problem presented by the rash of young 1970s directors who built their careers on paying homage to the films they grew up on is that they invite you to pay attention to such things. 

Making A Spectacle
The thick glasses worn by Courtland's therapist (Stocker Fontelieu) in Obsession evoke
Kasey Rogers' pivotal eyewear from Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train

When, under normal circumstances, all I want to do is sit back and enjoy a film on its own merits, this league of self-conscious, self-aware, and self-referential filmmakers (Peter Bogdanovich comes to mind) invites me to participate in an insider's game. One side of my brain is supposed to watch the film as a direct narrative, while simultaneously, the other side of my brain is induced to play "catch the reference."

Keeping track of all the cinematic references, comparisons, re-creations, and outright thefts can be a lot of fun for a film geek like me, but it comes at a price: all that attention to style keeps me at an emotional remove from the story being told. Each visual nod to a well-known film, each insider homage to a beloved filmmaker's technique, is like a tap on the shoulder, reminding me not only that I'm watching a movie, but that the director is drawing attention to themselves. 

I watch the film, even enjoy the film, but since the filmmaker is "toying" with the cinema technique...I never surrender to it. 

Scissors figure prominently both in Obsession and Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder

Obsession is a film bursting at the seams with style. It looks great: Oscar-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) bathes the film in a dreamy, diffused-lit glow that creates an appropriately unreal reality. It sounds great: This is perhaps my favorite Bernard Herrmann score. It's a compelling mystery, well-told: distracting as it may be, no one can say Obsession's showy visual style isn't perfectly suited to the story. 

But for all the engaging performances and cinema storytelling savvy, for the life of me I can't say the film ever swept me up in the obsessions that are the key to making the film really work. There's a lot going on that keeps you in your seat and keeps you wondering (and even caring) what will happen next, but a film like Obsession should be haunting. 

Once the film is over, there should be something about this eerie narrative that is difficult to shake off. Personally, I think if half the care lavished on the look and atmosphere of the film had been applied to the characters and performances, Obsession would have been the De Palma film you couldn't forget instead of the De Palma film almost no one remembers. 

The Vertiginous Circle
The camera swirling around two individuals locked inside
their own world is easily my favorite effect

In writing about the Hitchcock style that runs throughout Obsession, I suppose it's worth noting that in 1976, Alfred Hitchcock released his 53rd (and final) feature film, Family Plot. It opened in theaters four months before Obsession was released (and perhaps played a role in the shelved Obsession finally getting a release date). 

I don't recall if critics made any comparisons between who was more Hitchcockian at this point: the pretender or the real-deal; but I do remember that so much nostalgia was attached to the release of Family Plot (Hitchcock was 77 and ailing) that few dared hint that the Master of Suspense's latest effort was not really all that memorable, either.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
There's an old axiom in film that goes something like: They'll forgive you anything if you have a good ending. Screenwriter Paul Schrader has been on the outs with Brian De Palma ever since (under the insistence of Bernard Herrmann) he dropped Deja Vu's third act. I've no idea how the original ends (the uncut screenplay is featured with the UK DVD version of Obsession), but for my money, the ending as it stands is sheer perfection.
Many a good thriller finds itself fizzling out to a so-so or anticlimactic conclusion after a promising buildup. Obsession is the exception. Starting with a great, albeit familiar, premise, the film builds methodically and atmospherically throughout, even managing to sustain suspense as the key to the relatively easy-to-figure-out mystery reveals itself.

Late in the film, things grow worrisome as it appears as though Obsession's measured pacing is to be abandoned in favor of a hasty denouement; but De Palma has one more trick up his sleeve and it proves to be so good that you honestly do forgive the film its implausibilities (big and small) and its short-shifting of character and motivation.

The ending is a suspenseful, startling, and very moving bit of pure cinema. Pure cinema because it is gratifying in ways that have nothing to do with narrative logic or reason, but everything to do with the overwhelming power of the mechanics of style. The sequence works simply because it visually fulfills, in those final minutes, all the romance, passion, and mystery its premise had always promised. Perhaps it's an example of too little too late, but it's only during the film's final scenes that Obsession finds its "crazy." And when it does, it's simply beautiful. Too bad that crazy passion took so long to rear its head.

Past or Present? / Original or Copy?

BONUS MATERIAL

"Obsession" 1976

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2017

PICNIC 1955

Good, old-fashioned, classic movie storytelling doesn’t get much better than the first 80-minutes of Picnic. Comprehensive yet concise; expositional yet economical; intimate, but at the same time expansive, Picnic seamlessly blends sensitive drama, delicate humor, and dreamy romanticism. All the while sustaining an entertainingly effortless narrative flow.

Picnic’s depiction of life in a small Kansas town in the midst of prepping for Labor Day festivities—its people, their routines and rituals, both mundane and apart–—is evocatively rendered in that uniquely idealized, true/false reality Hollywood does so well. Full of finely-observed details of character and setting redolent of William Inge’s childhood spent in Independence, Indiana (where his mother ran a boarding house inhabited by spinster schoolteachers), Picnic is set in the then-contemporary 1950s, but has thenceforth become cloaked in a rosy nostalgia which looks back on a time when drifters hopped boxcars, marriage was the end all and be all for any single woman, and people wore ties, sportcoats, and full-skirted dresses to picnics.

William Holden as Hal Carter

Kim Novak as Madge Owens

Rosalind Russell as Rosemary Sydney

Betty Field as Flo Owens

Susan Strasberg as Millie Owens

Cliff Robertson as Alan Benson

The last day of summer serves as both the time-frame and primary narrative metaphor of Picnic, William Inge’s wistfully contemplative look at the sometimes painful inevitability of growing up. Following the death of his alcoholic father, handsome but feckless Hal Carter (Holden) drifts into town in search of a job from former college pal Alan Benson (Robertson), whose father is a grain industrialist. The story's unnamed Kansas town (represented in the film by four real-life Kansas towns) has a stressfully low male-to-female-ratio, the heat and idleness of the summer contributing to the town's dormant powderkeg atmosphere of  sexual frustration and withering dreams.

Town beauty Madge Owens (Novak) is the vessel of everyone’s projected fantasies in spite of the fact that, while not very bright, she’s smart enough to know (in 1955 yet) that being the object of the appreciative gaze is not the same as being appreciated.

Into this ripe-for-disruption environment comes Hal, whose rambunctious, superannuated frat-boy act—invariably played out sans shirt—understandably draws the attention of the local women folk. There’s favorable: the grandmotherly Mrs. Potts (Verna Felton); the puppy-love type: tomboy-in-transition, Millie Owens (Strasberg); distrustful: Flo Owens (Field), a mother alone raising two girls; conflicted: repressed schoolmarm Miss Sydney (Russell); and of course, love at first sight: Madge. Hal’s appearance in town has a different effect on each character, and as they all converge at the picnic, Labor Day becomes something of a day of reckoning, bringing out the best or worst in each individual. Truths are confronted, illusions shattered, facades dropped, and everyone is forced to grow up just a little bit. 

Verna Felton as Helen Potts
TV fans will recognize Felton from her guest stint as the maid from hell on I Love Lucy, or as the voice of Wilma's mother on The Flintstones

Picnic is one of those movies I discovered on TV as a child (loaded with commercials and only in an awful pan-and-scan version) and fell in love with from the start. To this day Picnic remains one of my favorite comfort movies. I can watch it (the first third, anyway) anytime, anywhere. These days, without exception, if ever I happen to be channel-surfing cable TV and Picnic pops up, I always tell myself I’m only going to watch it for a couple of minutes, but before I know it…boom! an hour has passed. That I own a DVD copy of it matters not a whit…I just take such pleasure in the film's setting, characters, conflict, and dialogue; I never tire of it.

That I expressly favor the first 80-minutes of this nearly two-hour film (those comprising the introduction of the main characters, establishment of the central plot, and the picnic scene in its entirety) speaks to director Joshua Logan’s breezy and sure-footed handling of these character-driven, slice-of-life early sequences. Winner of the 1953Tony Award for his direction of the original Broadway production, Logan shines brightest when Picnic is capturing vivid tableaux of small-town culture, or compassionately conveying the defeated spirit born of withered dreams and repressed hope.

As fellow schoolteachers, character actresses Reta Shaw (Irma Kronkie) and Elizabeth Wilson (Christine Shoenwalder) recreate roles they originated on Broadway

Somewhat less persuasive is his handling of the film’s final third, which becomes a little too melodramatic and plot-driven for my taste. Here, as if under outside pressure to provide some “action” in an otherwise gentle romantic drama; Inge’s sensitive play feels as though it were temporarily hijacked by Douglas Sirk. And to little effect, I'm afraid, as the swift introduction of a gratuitous car chase and unconvincingly-staged two-against-one fistfight with armed lawmen merely succeed in being distracting. Not helping matters further is the fact that, in lieu of a then-unthinkable sex scene between Holden and Novak, we have in its place, three (count ‘em, three) repetitious and very talky “tortured longing” scenes which never fail to leave me looking at my watch.

Discounting this sluggish detour, Picnic gets back on track with the final scene, where story threads are tied up and Rosalind Russell’s performance single-handedly reinforces my opinion that the too-casual romance between Rosemary and Howard is the film’s most satisfying love story. 

Recreating the role he originated on Broadway, Arthur O'Connell as Howard Bevans received the only acting category nomination of Picnic's  total of six (it won two: Art Direction and Editing). Many thought Rosalind Russell was a shoo-in for a nomination, if not a win, had she allowed herself to be submitted in the Supporting Actress category, which she refused. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Even as a kid I was hard-pressed to imagine a time when a film as tame as Picnic could ever be considered racy.  But of course, at that age I had no idea that Madge and Hal’s impassioned embraces alongside that barreling freight train was Censorship Code shorthand for sex, and, to be honest, only after it was brought to my attention in a college film class did it ever cross my mind that it was Inge’s intention to intimate (a little too subtly, if you ask me) that Rosemary and Howard had also had sexual relations that night. Who knew?  Anyway, from its male bodice ripper ad campaign to its convention-flouting themes of sexual frustration and libidinous urges, Picnic was pretty hot stuff in its day.

But Picnic’s reputation as a classic romantic movie doesn’t resonate with me very strongly (the sex feels born of despondency more than passion). Not as strongly as its sharp-eyed, often witty, depiction of small-town life and the incisive details William Inge (Splendor in the Grass, Come Back, Little Sheba) brings to his characters.

Failure to Live up to Expectations
Alan's resentment of Hal is rooted in feeling he is a disappointment to his father

Inability to Accept Reality
Flo copes with past failures by projecting all of her hopes for happiness on daughter, Madge 

Lack of Identity
Madge longs to find something to value about herself beyond her beauty 

PERFORMANCES

Picnic is a uniformly well-acted motion picture that, like a great many '50s films adapted from stage plays of the day (the works of Tennessee Williams come to mind), retains a certain staginess in dialogue and acting style which locks it forever in particular era. That the overall appealing performances in Picnic seem also to be a tad old-fashioned plays favorably into the whole glimpse into the past, days-gone-by feel of the movie as a whole. 

Perhaps because the central romance feels as though it's based primarily on physical attraction (for all his talking, Hal never asks Madge anything about herself), my strongest memories of Picnic have to do with Rosalind Russell’s superb performance as Rosemary, the old-maid schoolteacher. In a career of many high points, I think this is one of Russell's best performances and she practically walks off with the entire film. (Which is probably what Russell felt, too, explaining her refusal to be considered as a supporting player by the Academy.)
Here, the actress's trademark sardonic wit and vitality is channeled into a character whose thin veneer of nonchalance and dimming vestiges of pride show the wear of too many lonely Labor Days bleeding into solitary school semesters. Russell gives the role everything she's got, and she is, in every scene, a force of nature daring you to look at anyone else. She’s funny, moving, sad, and even pitiful; but you wind up rooting for her and she’s a marvelously sympathetic, dimensional character. 

If Picnic falls short of being the great film it might have been, I'd attribute it to the sense I have that everybody is pushed a little too strongly against type. I agree with the common complaint that William Holden is too old for his role (not jarringly so, but his college days seem far, far behind him) and that his attempts at expressing Hal's coarse nature aren't all that convincing. And while he's every inch the likable charmer the role requires, Holden's efforts just feel forced when trying to play dumb. The same can be said for the sad-eyed Novak, who has Madge's vulnerability down, but lacks (oddly enough) the kind of switchblade, protective shield of vanity unconfident pretty girls carry around with them like security blankets. She too, seems a bit too astute.

Susan Strasberg, while the right age for Millie, is far too angularly beautiful to be believable as either a tomboy or anybody's definition of "goonface." She seems out of her element in the earlier scenes where's she's called upon to convey juvenile anxiety, but seems to relax into both herself and the role as the film progresses. Cliff Robertson, on the other hand, is a perfect fit. I've never been much of a fan of Robertson, but I like him a great deal in this movie.

"I had a job as a model once...like this. They had me posing in front of a class almost raw."
Hal shares one of the high points of his checkered past with the adoring Millie. For those too young to know just what '50s male physique modeling looked like, I offer this real-life sample to illustrate that Mr. Holden was right on the money. The nude model is Tabby Anderson (!) which is the ideal name for my cat...if I ever get one.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

When I was a child, it seemed every household in the neighborhood had an LP of the Picnic soundtrack, or, if not the score itself, most certainly one of the myriad easy-listening versions of “Moonglow/ Theme from Picnic” available on instrumental collections from the likes of Living Strings or Ferrante & Teicher. I cannot honestly recall when I first heard this popular medley (which I considered “old people’s music” at the time), but it’s as much a part of my childhood as the theme from The Mickey Mouse Club, and to this day I can’t hear Moonglow (a 1933 song, I was later surprised to discover) without seeing William Holden and Kim Novak dancing so photogenically under those paper lanterns.

In this great shot representative of the consistency in performances throughout Picnic, each character reacts differently to the sight of Madge as she's crowned "Queen of Neewollah" 

Well, perhaps calling Novak & Holden's movements “dancing” is casting a rather wide net (neither star held any illusions about their dancing skills, Holden being so reluctant as to request extra pay and getting himself fairly drunk before filming), but after all these years I still get quite a kick out of that iconic sequence. Both actors radiate old-fashioned movie star luster; Novak’s steady, unbroken gaze is sexy as hell, and that elusive thing called chemistry is present in almost corporeal abundance.

Composer George Duning’s Oscar-nominated score--which, upon occasion, veers perilously close to Carol Burnett-spoof territory when significant dramatic events are histrionically emphasized by blasts of horns serving as the musical equivalent of exclamation points--is absolute perfection here. The smooth jazz arrangement of the pop standard Moonglow, lushly underscored by the orchestral Picnic theme, creating a sense that our lovers-to-be are dancing to two songs: the tune played at the picnic itself, and a melody only they alone can hear.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

William Inge’s Picnic won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1953, but if your only familiarity with it is the film version--rather brilliantly adapted and opened-up for the screen by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Daniel Taradash (From Here to Eternity) --seeing it on stage can be quite the sobering experience. In the theatrical version, all the action plays out on the back porches and adjoining backyards of Mrs. Potts and Mrs. Owens. The titular picnic is never shown!

Happily for literal-minded me, the film version has a masterfully constructed, protracted picnic sequence that not only shines as a fine example of studio-era location shooting, but serves as the film's narrative and thematic nucleus. The five-minute montage that kicks off the sequence is so good it could stand alone as a short film highlighting 1950s Americana. James Wong Howe's CinemaScope cinematography covers all the action and basks everything in such a honey-colored glow, no wonder this amusing and appealing sequence continues to be the part of Picnic I remember most fondly.

Save for the obvious set for the Moonglow dancing dock, the entirety of the picnic sequence was filmed in Halstead, Kansas. The swimming lake scenes in Sterling, Kansas. In the screencap above, that's Nick Adams (Bomber) and What's My Line? stalwart  Phyllis Newman (Jaunita Badger).

BONUS MATERIALS 

Jennifer Jason Leigh played Madge in a 1986 made-for-cable-TV production of Picnic for Broadway on Showtime co-starring Gregory Harrison (who produced, answering any "WTF?!?" casting questions) and Rue McClanahan. Like the 1987 film Dirty Dancing, this adaption of Picnic, although set in the 1950s, has '80s written all over it. It's available for viewing on YouTube.

Broadway on Showtime Presents: Picnic

I didn’t grow up in a small town, and this typically Hollywood, all-white vision of Midwestern life is nothing I clutch to my bosom with misty-eyed nostalgia (although with HD and sharp eyes you might catch a fleeting glimpse of one or two black people in the picnic scenes). But on a human level, I tend to find irresistible any story which celebrates, with compassion and dignity, the small struggles and victories of people leading simple lives. Few writers conveyed this with as much heart and humor as William Inge.

Copyright © Ken Anderson