Picnic Reviews

Even in 1955, I find it hard to believe that this was wild, transgressive, erotically charged cinema. Not in a decade that gave us Nicholas Ray’s subterfuge of teenage ennui (Rebel Without a Cause), two of Billy Wilder’s naughtiest comedies (The Seven Year Itch, Some Like It Hot), and numerous Tennessee Williams adaptations (A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof being the cream of the crop). In contrast to those particularly daring and sexually knowing works, Picnic has not aged particularly well.

I’m sure there’s still some power packed into the stage show, but the movie does not unfold with the same energy and sense of creation. Director Joshua Logan is too fond of set-ups and compositions that call to mind a proscenium stage instead of a lived-in small town. Too often they’re all crowded around each other looking towards the camera, instead of some facing away from us, or moving in a more organic way.

Logan’s always done well with actors, look no further than some of the career-best work he pulls from Red Buttons in Sayonara and Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop, and his ensemble of female players are all delivering the goods here. Betty Field, Susan Strasberg, Verna Felton and Cliff Robertson are uniformly solid. Rosalind Russell is the prime supporting player, constructing a desperate and vulnerable woman afraid of her impending spinsterhood. Russell tears into her scenes with a ferocity that borders on the terrifying, especially in scenes where she’s drunk and her voice alternates between a melodious upper range and her cigarette-torn lower register. Arthur O’Connell underplays many of his key scenes with her, giving their romantic pairing an aching tremor and sparkling energy that much of the film lacks.

While I generally have mixed feelings towards Kim Novak’s work as an actress, she’s in fine form here. To hear Novak speak about the role, she was Madge. A beautiful girl desperate to be seen as a whole, complete person, as something beyond her genetic blessings. That core of truth is present throughout her work, and she brings a fragility and empathy to the role that another actress may have skipped over. The first time I watched the film, I found some of Novak’s line-readings zombie-esque and extremely passive, but I find this to be the correct choice the more I think about it. Madge is a girl entombed by choices made for her, by people only capable of seeing the outer shell and not the deeply unhappy girl underneath. Her numerous scenes of daydreaming stares and erotic longings are indelible.

The other major problem with Picnic, besides the general sexual hysteria that’s played slightly tone deaf by Logan, is the casting of William Holden as the transient bad boy. Holden’s dark, smoldering charms, his world-weary vocal cadences and natural cynicism are a good match for the part, but he’s clearly too old for the role. His scenes with a dewy Novak don’t play as believable romance, and the major efforts to de-age him appear silly when he stands next to Cliff Robertson, who is supposed to be a former college buddy. Holden has many of the checklist requirements for the part, and does a commendable job in selling it, but the role remains an inessential one compared to juggernauts like Sunset Boulevard or Stalag-17.

While Picnic is loaded with overwrought emotions and purplish prose, it looks and sounds fantastic with lush cinematography and a pleasant score. A good trimming would have done this film a world of good, though. How many scenes of the townspeople and random events of the titular picnic did we need? Several of the sequences, mainly in the final thirty-minute stretch, feel as if they drag on and on before just stopping from a lack of energy. It's never awful, and for a certain camp value it's kind of amazing, but Picnic is mostly frustrating. it hovers in that film limbo where a few edits could have turned it into an essential classic.