"Picnic" on Labor Day [by David Lehman]

<< Hal Carter (William Holden), a football star in college and a failure at everything since, hops off a freight train with nothing but the ragged shirt on his back. He arrives at a last resort: the small town in Kansas where his fraternity mate, Alan Benson (Cliff Robertson), the well-to-do son of an industrialist, lives. It is Labor Day, 1955, and everyone has the day off, but Hal offers to do back-yard work for Mrs. Potts (Verna Felton), the kindly old lady who feeds him and obligingly offers to wash his shirt, thus giving us a look at his buff, shaven chest.

The “us” in that last sentence includes Benson’s girlfriend, Madge Owens (Kim Novak at her most stunning). At the town’s annual Labor Day picnic, Madge will be crowned the Queen of the Neewollah (Halloween spelled backwards). Many, including Millie (Susan Strasberg), Madge’s young sister, drink too much at the picnic, and Hal gets blamed for everything that goes wrong.

Neither Holden nor Novak is a natural dancer, but when they dance at the picnic to the tune of “Moonglow,” the sparks fly. Whereas Novak and James Stewart play out a passionate romance on the interior level of the psyche in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the physical attraction between Novak and Holden is electric. Benson castigates the “same old Hal” to whom he had earlier promised a job, albeit as a “wheat scooper” rather than the executive positon Hal had unrealistically hoped for. Hal leaves town the same way he arrived, only this time, Madge packs a suitcase and plans to take a bus to meet him in Tulsa.

Rosalind Russell and Arthur O’Connell give outstanding performances as the town’s frustrated schoolmarm and her reluctant suitor, who must settle for what small-town life can give them. Joshua Logan directed this film adaptation of William Inge’s Broadway play. See Picnic on Labor Day weekend if you can. It’s hot. >>

from "For Every Season, A Classic Holiday Movie" by David Lehman | August 28, 2021. Click here for the rest of this  "Talking Pictures" post written for The American Scholar.

Comments

[Mindy Aloff]

David, our fearless leader here, asked me what I thought of this dance. I replied more or less as follows:

"Oh, I agree with the writer Laura Leivick: It's quite possibly the sexiest dance ever put on film.

"The choreographer (uncredited) was Miriam Nelson.
Her IMDb bio: 'Debuted on Broadway in 1938. Married fellow dancer Gene Nelson. When Gene joined the Signal Corps, Miriam went to Hollywood and signed an acting-dancing contract with Paramount. She eventually became a choreographer in film, choreographing many musical numbers for Gene once he had a contract with Warner Bros. After her divorce from Gene, she eventually married producer Jack Meyers. Miriam was an extra in the party scene in Breakfast at Tiffanys, playing the girl arguing with the man wearing an eye patch. Taught Ingrid Bergman her dance scene in Cactus Flower. In 1969 she choreographed Disney on Parade. She married producer Jack Meyers and was eventually widowed. She returned to the stage in 1992 when her friend Marge Champion produced Ballroom at the Long Beach CLO. Her autobiography, with a forward written by Julie Andrews and Blake Edwards, was published in 2010.'
(Me again): "It also didn't hurt that the cinematographer of the film was James Wong Howe (with uncredited Haskell Wexler as the Second Unit Camera Operator), that Jean Louis had designed Kim Novak's dress, or that the little outdoor spot they were dancing in had been designed by Jo Mielziner, who, with colleagues art director William Flannery and set decorator Robert Priestley, won an Oscar for Art Direction-Color for their work on this film. Of course, crucial to the effect of the dance scene was George Duning's Oscar-nominated score. His 'Theme from "Picnic"' (which reached Number One on the 1956 Billboard charts) was, as the resisting stars gradually inched together, suavely introduced to and then--Oh, Mama!--melded with the music of the 1930 song 'Moonglow' by Columbia's musical director Morris Stoloff. The fact that Holden, allergic to dancing, had to get practically falling-down drunk to do the scene, while Novak couldn't wait to tear herself away to go to church, located this superficially cool summer-evening intimacy on top of an underground volcano of banked fires; the individuals can barely relate while the sliding musics mate them. Someone reviewing it brilliantly compared it to a baked Alaska; as Laura quipped to me about Holden, 'He can bake my Alaska any time.'"

[Emily Fragos]

Yes, Holden was too old for that role. Yes, Holden and Novak were known to be awful dancers. Yes, there was an actual hurricane bearing down on the Kansas town where it was filmed; yet while barely touching and hardly moving, Holden and Novak created one of the most moving, charged, and iconic dance scenes in movie history, a thrill to watch, some 60+ years later.

[David Lehman]

Thank you for the wonderful comments, Emily and Mindy.