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

VERTIGO 1958

I guess it says something about a suspense thriller when you can watch it multiple times, long after the central mystery of its plot has been revealed, with no lessening of engagement or enjoyment. In the case of Alfred Hitchcock’s mesmerizingly bizarre Vertigo, the film itself is so unusual, its subject matter so psychosexually dark, I find myself forgetting the “surprise reveal” of the mystery altogether and just lose myself in what a perversely obsessive vision of romance a major Hollywood studio was able to get away with in the repressed environment of the late-'50s.

As one of five films owned by Hitchcock and removed from circulation in 1973 so his lawyers could better hammer out new deals for their television and theatrical distribution rights (the others being The Man Who Knew Too Much, Rope, Rear Window, and The Trouble With Harry), Vertigo wasn’t available for viewings of any kind, singular or multiple, during my high school and college years.
The deceptively simple suspense plot about a retired detective who falls in love and later becomes obsessed with the woman he's been hired to follow is one of the darkest and most self-revealing films in the Hitchcock canon.

Barely Hanging On
Vertigo is a film about a man's psychological spiral into the abyss

Considered neither a commercial nor critical success in its initial release, by the mid-'70s, interest in Vertigo had grown significantly. This is mainly due to the film’s unavailability and (most significantly) the youth-inspired / New Hollywood reevaluation of Alfred Hitchcock and his works. Spearheaded by the French New Wave and director François Truffaut’s by-now-classic 1967 book of interviews: Hitchcock by Truffaut, a generation of young film enthusiasts have come to regard Hitchcock (heretofore considered a professionally efficient, studio-system director of popular entertainments) as an auteurist maverick in the manner of contemporaries John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles.

This well-taken (if functionally naïve) position was readily adopted by me and most everyone else I went to film school with—the mean age of the collective student body betraying the fact that Vertigo was, to most of us, one of those films more praised in the abstract than actually seen.

Jimmy Stewart as John "Scottie" Ferguson

Kim Novak as Madeline Elster

Kim Novak as Judy Barton

Barbara Bel Geddes as Midge Wood

As a kid, the full extent of my knowledge of behind-the-scenes motion picture personnel were the opposite-ends-of-the-spectrum names of Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock: two of the most visible and TV-familiar behind-the-scenes faces of the '60s Hollywood. With only the most cartoonish notion of what a director or producer actually did (I had, after all, seen all of the “Lucy goes to Hollywood” episodes of I Love Lucy), thanks to the TV anthology series Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, I knew one thing: Disney meant funny, and Hitchcock meant scary. Hitchcock’s The Birds and the deeply traumatizing Psycho had enough of a “Creature Features”/ William Castle vibe about them to satisfy a young person’s notion of what a scary movie should be. But Vertigo (which had its network TV premiere in 1965 and reran consistently), despite Hitchcock’s name and the similar one-word title, was just too slow and kissy-faced to hold my interest.

For Bay Area kids in the '70s, scary movies
meant one thing and one thing only: Creature Features

Once it became clear that Kim Novak’s rigid hairdo wasn’t in danger of a crow attack, or that Jimmy Stewart wouldn’t be donning a dress or wielding a knife anytime soon, I gave up on trying to sit through it. By the time I reached my teens and public interest in Vertigo had renewed my curiosity, it was too late. I ultimately didn't get to see Vertigo until after it was released on DVD, restored and pristine, in 1999.

Alfred Hitchcock's much-analyzed "pure cinema" style is evident throughout Vertigo.
The dizzying spiral motif.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Contrasted with my youthful antipathy towards Vertigo, my adult response to the film was near-obsessive adoration. I immediately fell in love with its absorbingly intriguing plot and the descriptively cinematic methods Hitchcock uses to tell the story and reveal character. A trait shared by most of the filmmakers I admire is their fluency in the visual language of film. They don’t just allow their camera to record events: through lighting, angles, music, and editing, they employ techniques that help to shape the viewer's perception of what is happening and what the characters are feeling.
I’m not always persuaded by Hitchcock’s sometimes jarring shifts from visually striking location shots to patently fake-looking studio sets and process photography, but in a story as subjectively stylized as Vertigo, even artificiality works in the film’s favor.

(My partner, who doesn’t exactly worship at the altar of Hitchcock, thinks the director’s predilection for rear-screen projections and patently sound-studio outdoor sets recall the look of Disney’s live-action films. A running gag is for him to poke me in the ribs at any instance of obvious rear-projection or stagy outdoor sets in a movie and exclaim (in mock sincerity), “Oh look, Ken…a Hitchcock film!”)

Hitchcock was the best at using imagery to convey emotional states

PERFORMANCES

I’ve previously commented on my belief that movie star appeal (as opposed to actor appeal) is rooted in a performer’s ability to consistently project a distinctly intimate quality about themselves from film to film. To, in effect, imprint each role with their personality rather than lose themselves within a character.

I don’t know very much about Kim Novak’s personal life, but of all the '50s sex symbols, she has always struck me as one of the most sad-eyed and reluctant. She never appeared to enjoy the objectification that is the sex symbol’s stock-in-trade. Rather, much like the character she played in Picnic, Novak seemed to be somewhat shy, sensitive and desirous of someone to take notice of something about her beyond her beauty.

Vera Miles was initially cast in the Kim Novak role
but had to drop out of Vertigo due to pregnancy.
Hitch was not happy

It’s this quality Kim Novak brings to the dual characters of Madeline/Judy in Vertigo. A quality one might go so far as to say is exploited by Hitchcock, given how painfully tangible Novak makes Judy’s longing for Scottie to love her for herself.

As compelling as they are, I confess that I find the sequences where Scottie attempts to make Judy over in Madeline’s image particularly painful to sit through. I derive no pleasure from the subtle self-deprecation glimpsed behind Judy’s poignantly eager-to-please glances and nervous smiles as Scottie demands more and more of the real Judy to retreat into his fantasy. These scenes are so difficult to watch because those flashes of resigned sadness in Judy harken back to that dolefulness I’ve always perceived in Novak’s eyes in other films.

Much has been written about Scottie's tortured character, but the character of Judy is equally forceful. A woman who allows herself to be made over not once, but twice, in the image of another man's ideal. The whole "makeover" fetish is a lamentable, psychologically abusive motif standardized in many areas of contemporary pop culture. There's the cliche of the buttoned-down secretary who removes her glasses ("Why, Miss Bracegirdle...you're beautiful!") or the woman with the tightly-pinned hair who suddenly wears it loose after being made "a real woman" by the hero. This redemption through transformation is expected in the fashion and beauty industries, and even romanticized and rendered "cute" in movies like Grease (what an odious message that film sends to girls). I think Kim Novak is marvelously affecting and heartbreaking in conveying the need-to-please/loss-of-self side of her character in Vertigo, and her performance is easily the best of her career.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

As a former resident of San Francisco, I have a weak spot for movies that make the city look like my idealized memories of it. The San Francisco of Vertigo was long gone before I ever moved there, but it’s every bit as picturesque.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
“All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.”  - Frederico Fellini

Show me a filmmaker who denies his work has autobiographical subtext, and I’ll show you a filmmaker with good reason to try to convince himself of the lie. Back in 1971, Roman Polanski “doth protest too much” when critics took note of his Manson-esque depiction of slaughter in Macbeth. Similarly, Woody Allen took the same tact when the whole Mia Farrow/Soon Yi mess made the 42-year-old man/17-year-old girl romance at the center of Manhattan seem forever icky.

On its own merits, Vertigo is a near-perfect suspense thriller with a devastating tragedy at its center. The lovers are plagued by personal flaws and compulsions that induce them to act in ways that doom their union no matter how many times it’s played out. It’s a strange, deeply romantic film whose themes feel assertively antithetical to the kind of romantic myth typical of Hollywood films in the 1950s.

Top: In Vertigo, Hitchcock takes full advantage of the strange, spectral quality of the color green.
Below: The same eerie hue was used to equally chilling effect in the poster art for my favorite film of all time, Rosemary's Baby

What provides the film with its extra, voyeuristic kick is how closely Vertigo’s narrative hews to what has come to be known about Alfred Hitchcock’s personal obsessions and compulsions. Whether apocryphal or substantiated, the Hitchcock section of the library is loaded with tale after tale of his fixation on icy blondes and his controlling nature. Stories of his professional relationships with actresses Vera Miles and Tippi Hedren read like a character analysis of Vertigo’s Scottie Ferguson.

I've never been much of a fan of Jimmy Stewart, but if Vertigo works at all, it's because of his movingly tortured performance. Cast against type as a somewhat unpleasant and haunted character, Vertigo seems to tap into a heretofore unexplored cruelty in the actor, which makes his Scottie so flawed and vulnerable. I've never seen him better.

It’s this personal overlay that gives Vertigo its eerie punch and makes it feel at times as if the film were a subtly confessional probe into the darkest corners of what we sometimes label desire.

Jimmy Stewart & Kim Novak were paired again in the 1958 comedy, Bell Book & Candle. Here they make a cameo appearance on the film's soundtrack album cover in this shameless bit of product placement from the Shirley Booth TV show Hazel. (Both produced by Columbia Studios.)

Vertigo is not my favorite Alfred Hitchcock movie (that would be Shadow of a Doubt), but for me, it’s the film in which he most perfectly conjoins the elements of popular entertainment and art. It’s a hypnotically sensual film; cool, yet passionate, that has about it an inescapable air of sadness. Hitchcock is not the most impassioned of directors, but with Vertigo, he bravely explores the darker side of love in a way that feels both very humane and very private. Perhaps too much so for 1958 audiences?

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 = 20012