Joshua Logan | Picnic / 1955

a dystopia of small-town life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Taradash (screenplay, based on the stage play by William Inge), Joshua Logan (director) Picnic / 1955

 

A freight train stops briefly in a small Kansas town (an amalgam of Hutchinson, Halsted, Nickerson, Salina, and Sterling in the movie), a stranger who’s been riding the rails jumping off, washing his face and hands in a nearby waterfalls, and wandering over to a neighborhood of small white wood-frame houses. His name is Hal Carter (William Holden) we soon discover, but as strangers to small rural communities throughout history generally have been perceived to be, his handsome face and beautiful body spells trouble. After all, we are in the very middle of the 1950s when anything outside the norm was a national dilemma and even this very movie caused hearts to heave and declarations of moral outrage to be delivered in response to what now seems far tamer than a Doris Day / Rock Hudson feature film. But in 1955, this film shook up the Hollywood industry. As The New York Times critic Stephen Holden (no relation to William) wrote of the film’s 1996 reissue:

“In Joshua Logan's film version of the popular William Inge play, the sight of Kim Novak and William Holden eyeing each other like pieces of raw meat as they stepped out to slow-dance at a pavilion while friends and neighbors enviously ogled them was considered extremely provocative. The mystique of the virginal blond beauty helplessly drawn to the irresistible hunk had never been so plainly depicted in an American film.”

     Even today, when our tastes are so comparatively jaded that it is difficult not to laugh at their attempts to dance to a kind of jive / jazz influenced version of “Moonglow”  that requires sliding the hands together to get into the rhythm of the beat (Hollywood legend has it that, despite his many lessons, Holden was so nervous about performing the piece that he arrived to the set drunk), one has to admit there is still something breathtaking about the way Novak the lioness slinks down the concrete steps into the little clearing under the Japanese lanterns to meet her fellow feline head on. Their eyes, their torsos, and whatever other body parts they put into motion crackle with lust, Logan stopping the action every few moments just so that we watch the electricity flowing between them, helped along by the brilliant cinematography of James Wong Howe and the Copeland inspired score by George Duning.

   And it doesn’t stop there. Jealous, schoolmarm Rosemary Sydney (Rosalind Russell) tries to steal Hal away from the young girl, and when the startled stranger calls halt to her kidnapping, she accidentally on purpose rips away his shirt as if to get a better look at his rippling abs, before she lets go all of all her cannons about middle class respectability, denouncing him to the entire community, leading any acquaintances he’s made in his brief time in town and his old friend Alan Seymour to turn against him.

     The picnic of the title, which oddly enough was mostly held off stage in the theater version, is all too languidly laid out by Logan in the 20 minutes just previous to this remarkable scene. In comparison, it’s the most boring segment of the entire film, filled with, as critic Roger Ebert describes it, “crying babies, laughing babies, frowning babies, three-legged races, pie-eating competitions, balloon drops, concerts and boy-girl contests,” to name only a few of the attempted diversions. Picnics, are by nature perhaps, nearly impossible to depict on film. The worst scenes and the most banal songs of major works that feature them—The Pajama Game, The Music Man, and this film—represent arguably the worst moments in these films: “Once-a-Day-Year” (which even the mad dust-up dancing of Carol Haney can’t save), “Shipoopi,” and Picnic’s “Hail Neewollah.” Is it any wonder that, as Mrs. Potts reminds her neighbor Flo Owens, “Don’t you remember that at picnics everyone disappears.”

     Other than the dance sequence, the important events of the film take place before and after the Labor Day celebration, when there’s still plenty of emotional hefting to be done.

      It may seem odd, but it’s certainly predictable, that gay playwright William Inge spent most of his life writing about heterosexual relationships in small-town America, particularly from the viewpoint of women. In the 1950s when Inge was at his best, few stage dramas and no movie could discuss homosexuality, so a writer had little choice but to focus his intentions on the dominant forms of love.

      All of his figures suffer instead the mid-twentieth century American angst about class, identity, and sex while outwardly supporting and sustaining the very forces which are the causes of their inner suffering. In Picnic the females include an elderly woman, Helen Potts (Verna Felton) whose long-ago marriage was nullified by her dominating mother for whom she is still caring, and whose sexual life, in effect, has been terminated at an early age (information that appears in the play but not in the movie). It is no wonder that throughout the play she is fearless about inviting young men to “tromp” through her house and is the most encouraging character in the play for sexual encounters, particularly with handsome outsiders.

     Her next-door neighbor Flo Owens (Betty Field), on the other hand, has been in love and raised two daughters, but has been seriously hurt and damaged by her husband’s extramarital affairs which ended with his leaving her; it is inevitable perhaps that she seeks a seemingly “model” husband for her beautiful but not intellectually talented daughter, Madge (Novak), who, despite Flo’s moral scruples, she almost pushes to become more sexually involved so that the boy, Alan Seymour (Cliff Robertson), son of the wealthiest man in town, will quickly marry her before her beauty fades as she feels her own has, helping to cause the breakup of her marriage.

     The boarder in her house, the school teacher Rosemary Sydney (Russell) is perhaps the best example of this small-town hypocrisy. As a teacher she pretends to keep the highest of moral standards, but as a woman she is desperate in her middle-age to find a husband and willing to do nearly nearly anything to push even the man she doesn’t truly love, Howard Bevans (Arthur O’Connell), into marriage. She is the most openly conflicted person in the play, attacking those who drink while secretly imbibing and enjoying it, even to the point of becoming rather drunk at the picnic. As I mention above, she makes a desperate pass at Hal who, when he rejects her blatant sexual advances, she attacks as a sexual degenerate the moment after she has ripped off his shirt. She is desperate and sad in the pulls her society has demanded of her, displaying a horrific schizophrenia of church-going spinster and a sexually needy woman.

       Flo’s younger daughter Millie (Susan Strasberg), an intelligent, curious young, good-looking teenager who is beginning to realize that it is time for her to begin wearing dresses and dating young men, is equally confused by her tomboyish behavior, her dislike of all the young boys in her town, and her longings to leave and become a writer like the woman whose book, The Ballad of the Sad Café, she is currently reading, Carson McCullers. Inge codes this young girl as a future lesbian without needing to say a word about her sexual proclivities of which even she is still unaware.

       And finally, there is Madge, the most beautiful girl in town, a not terribly bright woman who, nonetheless, is tired of being merely the subject of the male gaze, and auditioning for the role of a future trophy wife that has no meaning other than through her physical appearance. She goes along with the path chosen for her by her own mother and the community at large, winning beauty contests such as the Neewollah Queen (Halloween spelled backwards, an interesting commentary about all of these Labor Day events), and making herself pretty, but is exhausted in seeking who she herself might truly be, while at the same time representing the essence of an insider, beloved by all.

     None of these women is happy, but then neither are the men of the community, even if Inge does not bother to explore most of their personalities in depth.

   The local paperboy Bomber (Nick Adams) would be a lover but hasn’t the looks, brains, or personality to be anything other than the loud-mouthed challenger he feels compelled to portray.

   Bevans is perhaps the most well-adjusted of all the characters—except for the fact that as a meek business man who has enjoyed the company of Rosemary, and who he lets himself be bullied into marriage simply to qualm her mid-life desperation.

    Even the wealthy young Alan realizes that no matter how well he achieves he will never be important in his father’s eyes, who likes prizes and contests, the richest man in the world, the best football scorer, the Queen of Neewollah, etc.

     The outsider to this community is the most angst-ridden of them all. Hal Carter (Holden) may have been once known as the best college football player of his day, but he comes from not only what is often described as “the wrong side of the tracks”—where, given the barriers of small-town USA, even the Owens’ and Potts’ small, white-framed houses are clearly located compared with the Seymour mansion—but is from a dysfunctional family in which the father was alcoholic and his mother involved with another man. He himself was arrested and sent way to reform school for stealing a ride on someone else’s motorcycle. And like Madge, he is not intellectually gifted, having flunked out of college. Only for a few years of fraternity life, when star football players are given permission to share quarters with wealthy frat boys when he met Seymour, has Hal lived in a world of permission, and even then, he was disliked for being a braggart.

    Since then, Hal has attempted to get a job in Hollywood, worked as a farmhand, and bummed around the country surviving through part-time jobs without ever being able to find something that might make him feel the glory he was awarded between the football game goal posts. Hal, in short,  is the all-American boy-man that constitutes so very much of the stereotype of the US male, the prom-King in high school who lives the rest of his life as kind of Willy Loman traveling salesman or serves out his sentence of adulthood as a janitor with a household of four or five children, the only difference being this man has had no high school days and no woman who has wanted him except women like the two he has met along the way, who engage him in sex and steal all his hard-earned wages.

    Yet finally, in this dystopic world, Madge and Hal meet up and discover a love for one another that changes their whole perception of themselves and is strong enough to make it worth leaving their known worlds for a strange urban haven. The city Hal chooses, ironically, suffered one of the worst incidents of racial violence in US history in 1921, but by the 1950s had come to be described as "American's most beautiful city."

      Inge makes clear that this couple, in their dependence upon emotion over intellect and their necessary reliance on their own good looks for survival, belong together. And it’s almost humorous to realize that in a film in which most directors (we have Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, and Richard Quine to prove it) would have circled their cameras around the star wagon of Novak’s almost ethereal beauty, the actively bi-sexual Logan, just as the play’s author plants its gaze firmly upon the endlessly shirtless male of this work, making it one of the most notorious of Beefcake movies in a time when Bob Mizer and others were quite actively establishing that genre through their muscle magazines and short films.

      But for all of the film’s notoriety and the hullabaloo surrounding it, Inge’s work and Taradash’s film adaptation is not truly about sex as much as it is about the dystopia of small-town life and values. The picture postcard realities that most Americans of the day kept in their heads about the joys of rural communities—an increasing number of new US urban dwellers having been raised in such villages and towns—was nonsense. Inge knew, despite his continued dependency on his childhood experiences from his hometown of Independence, Kansas, that any gay man had to escape that world for New York or California simply to keep his sanity. Unfortunately, in his continued focus on small town life, Inge was not able to deal successfully with his homosexuality nor the fact that his plays increasingly seemed out-of-touch with the contemporary concerns of the most Americans by the 1970s, taking his own life at the age of 60 in his Los Angeles home.

 

Los Angeles, April 6, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).