At my house, we watch Picnic every Labor Day weekend. It's a fantastic movie, and thankfully, the plot revolves around the September holiday, so I get to watch it every year.William Holden plays a no-good drifter who shows up in a small Americana town and shakes up the residents' established paths. I'm not really a William Holden fan, so I would have preferred Paul Newman to have been cast as the lead, but he wasn't a big star yet in 1955. Turns out, Paul was the understudy in the Broadway production of Picnic, so my casting instincts were pretty good! Betty Field has two squabbling daughters, Kim Novak, the beautiful but not very bright older daughter, and Susan Strasberg, young, gawky, and jealous of her sister's beauty. Kim is engaged to the well-to-do Cliff Robertson, but when William Holden shows up, her head turns, much to her mother's dismay. Rosalind Russell plays an old maid school teacher, desperate for her long-time beau Arthur O'Connell to marry her, and although her scenes are my worst part of the film, I feel it might not be fair to blame her performance. It might be her written character who gets on my nerves.This William Inge classic is a staple on must-see lists, and I suggest you add it to yours. There are unforgettable lines, like Kim Novak's, "I get so tired of just being told I'm pretty," and life lessons that really make you think: "You don't love someone because they're perfect." It's also a wonderful slice of nostalgia, taking place during a time when Labor Day was revered by all as the last weekend of summer vacation. Nowadays, school starts in early or mid-August, so the magic of Labor Day is no longer felt, and is even hard to imagine. But if you can, try to imagine that last precious couple of days of summer when anything is possible, and the most beautiful girl in town can be crowned queen for an evening, the same evening she falls in love with someone who thinks he doesn't deserve her.

This film couldn't have been made in any other decade but the 50's. Filmed in the elongated, vividly coloured wide-screen CinemaScope style of the day, it must have looked great on the big screen in the movie palaces back then. I also suspect it couldn't have been made in any other decade with its emergent adult themes in the wake of the revolution wrought by the success of "A Streetcar Named Desire". Itself based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, it's a tale of small-town ambitions, nascent sexuality and family conflict, triggered by William Holden's rebellious drifter arriving in town to shake up the locals and stir up a hornet's nest of emotions in his wake. The centrepiece of the film is the town's annual picnic where everyone attends what's more like an outdoor festival culminating in the crowning of a young beauty as the "Neewollah Queen".Principal amongst those affected by Holden's arrival is a struggling single-parent family of a middle-aged mother fonder of her younger, more intelligent but also rebellious, tomboyish daughter Millie who's into smoking, reading modern literature and against being cast as a conventional "lace and curls" young girl. Her older sister Madge, played by Kim Novak in her breakthrough role is the town beauty, soon to be the Neewollah Queen, just entering womanhood, but stereotypically assumed to be shallow and dumb, groomed by her mother into marriage with Cliff Robertson as the handsome but dull son of the local business tycoon, owner of the town's grain mills. When Holden turns up unannounced to stay next door with the family's good-natured elderly neighbour and later proposition old college chum Robertson for a job, sparks fly and conventions are broken over the course of the big picnic day. There's a sub-plot involving Rosalind Russell's ageing spinster teacher who initially scorns her boring middle-aged wooer Howard, but her emotions too get heightened by Holden's arrival turning her into a simpering, desperate man-eating woman who'll do anything to avoid being left on the shelf.Partly because of the second-hand nature of the plot, as a film it doesn't grab the viewer the way "Streetcar" did. Worse, Holden is several years too old for his part, looking positively fatherly in his scenes with Novak and even Robertson (not helped by both of them looking so young) and certainly doesn't possess the rebelliousness or physicality of Brando, his shirtless introduction at the start of the film only emphasising the point. Novak however is excellent as the awakening young girl who eventually rejects her stereotyping as the dim-witted beauty and shoo-in dutiful wife-to-be of Robertson. Russell was much praised at the time for her role as the frustrated teacher but I couldn't quite follow her character's reverse development, even if it is clearly set out as the opposite of the younger Novak's journey to a more-rewarding self-expression, plus the old-dear overacts for Kansas.For me the only time the film really came alive was in the celebrated dance scene at the picnic when Novak is first drawn to Holden, although its unquestionably her sexuality and sexiness which powers the scene. The direction by Joshua Logan, is only stolid however and while it features the famous helicopter high-aspect shot at the end in a rare moment of imagination, at other times there are some jarringly bad edits, most obviously in the intimate scenes between Novak and Holden and Russell and her man.One can only imagine what a Brando or Dean might have made of Holden's part but the film fails to compensate for this fatal casting error and correspondingly must be judged a failure.

A former college football star drifts into a small town on Labor Day, disrupting the lives of the locals. Director Logan came from a stage background and he never adapted to the film medium. He did not understand that film acting requires more subtlety than stage acting. Holden is certainly not known for overplaying, but Logan pushes him in that direction. He's not helped by some of his lines, particularly his repeatedly calling Novak "Baby." Yes, Inge's play won the Pulitzer Prize, but it is overly dramatic and contains some really corny lines. Russell is quite energetic. Novak, on the other hand, seems to be on a sedative. O'Connell and Strasberg come off best.

Corny and hokey. This movie is an example of what can happen when a the storyline of a play is changed to conform to a movie format. What is a tight wrapped theatrical production morphs into something almost unrecognizable from the original on the screen. This movie can be best summed up in one word: hokey. True, the movie was made in 1955, but still, by that time Hollywood was already treating the subject of sex in a more candid manner. This movie takes a great play with a lot of intense interactions and transforms it into an overblown mess with a lot of stagy overacting. Despite the title of the play, the story is not about a picnic, yet the movie makes a picnic a central feature of the story, which diverts the audience's attention from what is going on between the principal characters, who get lost in the crowd. If any movie did not need extras, this is the one. Yet for some reason, this movie has an army of extras playing picnickers. William Holden's performance is good but not especially strong or overpowering and there is little chemistry between him and Kim Novak. Much more intense and better acted are the performances by Rosalind Russell and Arthur O'Connell, both in supportive roles. The movie should have been about them.