野餐

A major Oscar contender (6 nominations including BEST PICTURE, DIRECTOR, with two wins), PICNIC derives from William Inge’s Pulitzer-winning eponymous play and this celluloid adaptation is also directed by its original Broadway helmer Joshua Logan, lensed by James Wong Howe in the expansive Technicolor and Cinemascope, prominently for its ending aerial shot, an avant-garde bravura of its time. The titular picnic takes place on the Labor Day, a drifter Hal Carter (Holden) blows in a sleepy Kansas town to seek out his former college roommate Alan Benson (Robertson), whose father owns the local grain business. But when his eyes catch those of Madge Owens (Novak), Alan’s 19-year-old girlfriend and the prettiest girl in the town, like struck by lightning, within a 24-hour span, their life will be eternally altered. It is a fish out of water scenario, peaked in the college, Hal was a football star passé, and hasn’t made good once out of the ivory tower, still possessing a jock physique (at the age of 37, merely two years younger than Betty Field, who plays Madge’s single mother, Holden is on the wrong side of Hal’s youthfulness and rather strains to sham that semblance), he is prone to take off his shirt at the drop of a hat, oozing raw sexual appeal that is much of a change in the eyes of the womenfolk, including Madge, her younger, bookish sister Millie (Strasberg), and Rosemary Sydney (Russell), the maiden schoolteacher. A rumbustious picnic follows, Logan marshals an appreciatively large number of extras to show off the down-home jollification, everyone has a whale of a time, even Hal seems to integrate into the chipper mass, yet, small talk can touch a raw nerve when his rodomontade is punctured by Alan’s brusque remarks, he is an outsider, a loser who hasn’t achieved anything, a bum with a cap in hand. That said, the potency of his outward virility becomes an ravishing draw of the opposite side, to Millie, he epitomizes the ideal manhood that stirs her adolescent feelings; to Rosemary, he reminds her of what she misses in a man and someone whom she can only abjectly desire in vain, since her bloom is long off the rose; but to Madge, they strike as a perfect match, their affections are mutual, only will she give up a financially secured life to explore an alternative one of uncertainty, what brings them together is elemental passion, but does that make for a viable ballast for a lifelong commitment, that is the sticking point here, and PICNIC certainly sticks to its guns on that matter, even Madge’s final change of mind is too contrived and entirely impractical under that circumstances (for a play it works because of the urgency to reach the finish line, whereas in a film, it is almost too blatant a wish fulfillment to wrap things up with such hurriedness). While an avuncular O’Connell receives the sole Oscar nomination among the cast - who plays Howard Bevans, the reluctant groom-to-be of Rosemary, with wonderful easement at first, then adroitly segues into more poignant and bemusing parts - there are plenty meritorious performance here: Field viscerally interprets a mother’s trepidation and fatality; Novak, in her star-making turn, counterintuitively renders Madge a tardiness, a tentativeness, an evasiveness that may give way to her limited chops, but it is so befitting to a nymphet who grows sick of being only seen for her outward beauty. Albeit being miscast, a rip-roaring Holden manfully offsets the disadvantage with mettle and exertion, his Hal is a rough diamond of sort who treads water for his inability and operates on primordial impulse that any viewer can intuit that the prospect of him and Madge is not propitious, but that is exactly the point, shall we root for a doomed affair just because the heart wants what it wants? Lastly, should Russell have deigned to campaign in the supporting actress category, history would’ve been rewritten in terms of the belonging of that golden statuette, her Rosemary is a revelation who tears into the most painful truth of a spinster’s dreadful fix, we are transfixed to dread her one-sided matrimonial bubble will burst once she stops dead in the hoopla near the end, Russell perseveres with a pained dignity and beams with a broad smile with gallons of emotion bottled up beneath. referential entries: Joshua Logan’s SAYONARA (1957, 7.4/10); Daniel Mann’s COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA (1952, 7.7/10).