Picnic

The people who made William Inge's Picnic into a movie had a problem--how to take fairly intimate play and make it fill their great big Cinemascope screen. They solved it by moving their cameras out to Kansas, which the playwright had only mentioned in the original stage production. This get-together turns out to be a hugh affair, complete with pie-eating competition, talent contests, and all the Mid-western trimmings. The picnic fills the screen, all right, but it is abyssmally dull. A few thousand people franticlly enjoying themselves all over the Kansas countryside are just not a particularly interesting subject for drama.

The principal characters of Inge's story are unfortunately not very interesting either. Several of them are frustrated women waiting around for some man to walk into their lives. But the man who finally comes, a one-time college athlete now turned bum, picks out the only engaged girl in the crowd as the object of his affection. Needless to say, the fact that the man to whom she is engaged happens to be the bum's sole college friend stops both of them only long enough to provide adequate running time for the film, and, of course, to get that picnic in.

It would have taken a remarkable cast to bring these proceedings to life. With only one or two notable exceptions, however, the actors are anything but remarkable. William Holden should never have been picked to play the indigent athlete since he is not only some ten years too old for the part, but also because he is very much the wrong type. To a role which requires a great deal of animal magnetism he brings only the clean-cut charm appropriate to a thoroughly tamed ideal husband.

Another disappointing performance is contributed by Susan Strasberg. Although the young actress is in the process of winning a large reputation for her work on Broadway, in the film she manages to do little more than sulk when she is called upon to portray a rather unattractive adolescent. Kim Novak's characterization as the girl who breaks her engagement has a somewhat greater depth and even a few touching moments. Yet her acting still does not match that of Rosalind Russel, who plays the part of a lonely schoolteacher. She appears both funny and pathetic when she all but swindles a reluctant bachelor into marriage.

Although a couple of good performances can conceivably outweigh the defects of a whole picture, they are not enough to keep Picnic from being dull. Not even the direction of Joshua Logan can do that. This is the first film which Logan has made in many years, so it is possible that his lack of familiarity with the medium led him on to approve such foolishness as the picnic scenes. At any rate, the eminent director's mere association with the picture is only another proof that the whole production is pretty well a general waste of talent.