PICNIC (1955)

Playwright William Inge, with a rep that waxes & wanes (currently waxing) as MidWest cousin to Tennessee Williams, tends to show his limitations in characters that often feel like Tennessee Williams rejects. Here, families in a ‘typical’ all-white MidWest town, but from different sides of the track (literally and figuratively), scratch the usual itches over a long, hot Labor Day celebration (sunup to sundown; plus tomorrow morn) as hunky William Holden’s out-of-town-stranger (college pal of local scion Cliff Robertson) bums his way up everyone’s gonads with manly testosterone dew. Debuting director Joshua Logan, who’d done the play on B’way (with Ralph Meeker &, Paul Newman) and previously only dabbled in film, has his cast playing to the balcony, even when whispering. Rosalind Russell’s sexually frustrated spinster teacher gets the worst of it, metaphorically ‘raping’ Holden when not ‘indicating’ her every desire. As sisters, Kim Novak (the looker) & Susan Strasberg (the brain) demonstrate the difference in film & stage acting, but do get Inge’s main point across: above the neck or below, sex rules the senses. Holden tried shaving a few years off his chest to finish his Columbia contract with a part he knew he’d outgrown. More worrisome, he’d have to dance. Logan took care of that by shooting his dance of seduction with Novak entirely from the waist up. They sway. But in general, Logan stiffens whenever three or more characters share the screen. So explain the super effective coverage of picnic gambols & fairground larking, some of the best work of his career? Credit cinematographer James Wong Howe who (according to assistant Haskell Wexler) all but co-directed much of the pic.* Visually, Logan never did anything to match this first outing.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *And Logan knew it, writing to Howe: ‘Jimmie, if I have been a successful director in this picture, it is enormously due to the encouragement, ideas and editing that you gave to me so generously . . . Very few times in my life have I worked with as fine an artist as you.’ Later, Logan would be particularly insensitive, even jarring, in blithely cutting between location & studio work.

DOUBLE-BILL: Logan double-dipped on Inge in a far stagier follow-up: BUS STOP/’56, with Betty Field & Arthur O’Connell, holdovers from this film, plus Eileen Heckart who did the Roz Russell PICNIC role on B’way, and acclaimed, if overripe turns from a debuting Don Murray and Marilyn Monroe in her ‘serious’ acting mode.