After falling on hard times, Hal Carter (William Holden) hops a freight train east to a small Kansas town where Alan Benson (Cliff Robertson) lives; an old friend from the fraternity and heir to a grain processing company.  Alan offers his prodigal friend a job at the plant as a laborer – a position which Hal feels is below him – and then he invites the man to join him at the annual Labor Day carnival down by the river.  He agrees, but tensions across the town quickly come to a boil as Hal’s attention is divided across sisters Millie (Susan Strasberg) and Madge Owens (Kim Novak) as well as Rosemary (Rosalind Russell), the schoolteacher who was drawn to Hal’s allure and grows jealous when she is denied by him.  Distraught, Rosemary fabricated a scandal against the drifter and the residents drive Hal back out of town. 

Joshua Logan directs Picnic for Columbia Pictures from a Daniel Taradash script adapting William Inge’s stage play of the same name.  Released late in 1955, the film was well received by critics and audiences, earning six nominations at the 28th Academy Awards and bringing home two statues at the end of the night for Best Art and Set Direction in the color category – William Flannery and Jo Mielziner and then Robert Priestley, respectively – as well as Best Editing; Charles Nelson and William Lyon.  James Wong Howe shoots the 115 minute film in Technicolor but opts for a streak of realism with the colors which helps keep the high drama grounded in some sense of reality though it never quite captures that golden turn from summer into autumn.  While the film boasts some powerhouse names on the call sheet, time marches on, and modern audiences may struggle to be swept away in what was surely a scandalous affair almost 70 years ago. 

The structure of the film is very much tied to the story’s roots on the stage, but Logan and Howe block the scenes and move the camera around to utilize the new freedom afforded them by the change in medium.  Howe’s camera is surprisingly active and not at all content to simply bear witness as the characters bustle to and fro in and out of frame.  We get to follow the characters as they leave and we see in through the different rooms, and the editing team makes great use of cutaway so that no flashing look of betrayal or disgust on the characters’ faces is missed as it may have been had we been sitting in the cheap seats at the Music Box Theatre where the play premiered a few years prior.  This approach helps to breathe some life into what could have been – and, admittedly sometimes still tips into – stodgy melodrama.  Magnified by the brief narrative timespan of essentially a single day from the first dawn to the next, exploiting any and all of the filmmaker’s tricks is necessary to help us connect with the immense and wild emotions presented without focusing on the hiccup of these grown and established adults upending their lives over what is essentially schoolyard crushes. 

While the craft behind Picnic does its best to sell the story, the direction given to the cast almost undermines this as they are all acting with a stately, bold style as if on stage, and it comes across as uncomfortably rigid once projected on a screen.  Some of this is still the result of being a product of its time where subtlety in performance had not taken such a strong hold of this branch of acting, but the fault also lies in the structure of the script that was written as if this were still to be performed on stage.  Like the play that it is based on, Picnic takes its time in revealing its themes and also just the general direction in which the plot is planning on moving.  Because of this narrative pacing, the cast have very little to build upon with themselves besides laying out their interpersonal dynamics, but the first scene at Helen Potts (Verna Felton) homestead.  Hal’s arrival injects a rugged energy into the scene otherwise occupied by four women, and with it comes a sense of livewire danger as they continue about their Labor Day preparations mindful that they can not be as open and free as they had been before this stranger arrived.  As they balance this new dynamic, the film slowly begins to come into focus.  Beyond Hal’s unannounced arrival, there is deep jealousy brewing between the sisters and Alan plays some role in all this.   

What really adds to the confusion though is the casting and how these characters are stylized and written against what they are saying and what we are told they are.  Hal is supposed to be in his twenties but he looks and holds himself like a man at least in his mid-thirties.  Holden was 37 at the time of the film’s release and even audiences at the time, while they admired the performance. were put off by just how old he looked given what his character was up to.  This is especially apparent as he flirts with Strasberg’s Millie who was 17 at the time.  Within the context of the film, Millie is supposed to be a college student, but the character presents far younger as the bookish sister who is always uncourteously compared to the uncontested beauty of her older sister, Madge.  Other than being the leading man so we accept his eventual relationships, there is zero chemistry between him and his romantic costars.  As for Madge, she seems more like a sister to her mother, Flo (Betty Field), than a daughter, but this dynamic does not present as such a large riff between what is on the page and what is seen as the others. 

The second act follows the town celebrating at the titular picnic and it takes up an impressive thirty minutes or so of runtime.  Despite the energy of the individual moments between the games, music, and general revelry, it is very hard to stay engaged with the film in this middle sag.  We are on the outside looking in, and because the events seem very manufactured as the cast and extras really struggle to appear natural on screen, it is hard to stay invested in the action. It is not until late in the evening when the carnival ends with a celebration crowning Millie as the Queen of Neewollah that the narrative engine chugs back to life.  With the sun down and the liquor flowing away from peering eyes, the townsfolk dance and sing on the banks of the river and Rosemary makes her advance on Hal.  Rejected and scorned, she grabs at him tearing his shirt and exposing his chest and arm, creating the iconic image which adorned the one sheets for the film the world around.

Everything boils over in the final act, but in the same way that confining the action of the play behind the proscenium arch would have created a pressure cooker sense to the drama, the adapted script did not account for the freedom that the camera provided in the early sections of the film and so the action did not impart the same atomic energy as these characters rapidly join and split and bounce off of each other.  Strangely, though, while these characters are given the physical freedom to move, they stay very emotionally sheltered and do not get much opportunity to allow their performance to really drill down into the nuance that the script requires of them.  As such, we never really find our bridge into the film, and without a connection to any of these sad and almost pathetic people, we look at them more with judgment in our hearts than with empathy.

Picnic is a difficult film, especially for the modern audience, to fall into.  It executes on its themes well enough in retrospect, but during the viewing, the film does not lay a strong enough foundation for what it is trying to do.  It is a story about the fading of youth and the fear of running out of time – all of which does lean in support of casting the much-too-old Holden to help physically represent this idea – but the filmmaking often gets in the way of the story.  A little self-indulgent, especially in George Duning’s immense score, Picnic is a victim like so many of these almost-searing dramas of the time by the taste and sensibilities that dictated the industry which was also trying to reshape itself in the wake of the dismantling of the studio system.  Like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) coming to screens just a few years after this Logan effort from Robert Brooks, the screen was still no place to delve into these themes and instead hopes that we are satisfied enough to sit back and be preoccupied with the luster of its stars.