Joshua Logan blows William Inge’s small play up to the width of a county and much of it goes soft, but Holden’s bruised swagger, Rosalind Russell’s desperate schoolteacher and one slow dance on a lit pier are worth an evening. Novak is the hole in the middle.
Joshua Logan directed William Inge’s Picnic on the stage, and here he films it in CinemaScope at 114 minutes with Daniel Taradash on the screenplay. The idea underneath is a good one and a simple one: a handsome stranger walks into a town on a public holiday, and by nightfall every woman in it has said out loud what she wants. That works in a room with three walls. The question the film spends two hours answering is whether it survives being made the size of Kansas, and the answer is that about half of it does.
William Holden is the half that does. He is plainly a decade too old to be Alan Benson’s college friend, and rather than hide it he plays Hal as a man who knows the boasting stopped working some years ago and cannot think what to do instead. He talks too loudly, takes the shirt off too readily, and every so often the face goes still and you see how frightened he is. Rosalind Russell matches him from the other side of the fence. Her Rosemary begins as comic relief, the schoolteacher who has opinions on everyone, and turns, a drink at a time, into the most exposed person on screen. There is a scene at the picnic where she goes for his shirt that we found hard to sit through, and we mean that as praise. Susan Strasberg’s Millie, all elbows and library books, is the one person who seems to be enjoying the holiday.
The picnic itself is where the widescreen pays for itself. James Wong Howe fills the frame with what looks like an entire county eating pie, racing three-legged and singing badly on a bandstand, and William Lyon and Charles Nelson cut it as a long afternoon rather than a montage, so that the light goes from white to gold to blue without anyone announcing it. Then Novak comes down the steps of the pier in a dress that was not made for a picnic, George Duning slides his main theme under the dance band, and Holden and Novak dance slowly under strings of coloured bulbs. We were got at by it, against every expectation, and the reason is that for four minutes nobody talks.
When they do talk, the trouble starts. Taradash has kept a good deal of Inge’s stage dialogue, and lines that carried across a theatre sound, in close-up and out of doors, like people reciting. Logan’s instinct when a speech runs long is to have the actor turn and deliver it to the horizon, and there is a great deal of horizon. Duning’s music, so exact in the dance, swells under every confession afterwards until we stopped believing the confessions.
Kim Novak is the larger problem. Madge is a girl who has been told she is beautiful so often she has stopped hearing anything else, and the part needs an actress who can show us what is going on behind the compliment. Novak gives us the compliment. She is lit beautifully by Howe and dressed beautifully, and when she is asked to want something she looks at the ground. Opposite Holden, who is doing too much, she does too little, and the romance the film is built on never quite has two people in it.
Jo Mielziner’s design deserves a word, because the back yards are right: two frame houses, a shared fence, a porch swing, the grain elevators standing at the end of the street like a fact nobody mentions. It is the one place where the film feels as small as the play, and it is where the best scenes happen. Every time Logan leaves the yard for a bigger view, the people shrink.
The reviews so far lean against the film, and the complaint is the same one: that Logan has taken a modest play and inflated it. We agree with the diagnosis and not with the sentence. The inflation is real, but it did not reach Holden, or Russell, or the pier, and a film with three things in it that good is not a failure.
See it for the picnic sequence and for Russell, and forgive it the speeches. It suits a summer evening at home with the windows open, where the horizon shots matter less and the back porch matters more.
