04.19.05
Movie Reviews: William Inge Double Feature: Picnic, Splendor in the Grass

Picnic (1955)

Betty Field is the mother of two fatherless teenagers- intellectual tomboy Millie (Susan Strasberg) and "prettiest girl in town" Madge (Kim Novak). They live on the wrong side of the tracks in small-town Kansas and rent out a room to spinster schoolteacher Rosemary (Rosalind Russell). And then William Holden jumps off a freight train, takes off his shirt and starts stirring things up.

The story unfolds over one day, at the town’s annual Labor Day picnic. Hal (Holden) the college football star-turned-drifter shows up to see if he can get a job in the grain business from his wealthy college friend (Cliff Robertson)- who Madge’s mother is trying to push her into marriage with. Of course Madge and Hal fall in love, and it’s Madge that has to make a decision whether to act on her feelings or keep to the safe path her mother has laid out for her.

Now, I’ve never felt one way or the other about William Holden, but he is pretty hot in this one- not to mention perfect for the part of a man who is approaching middle age (Holden was 35, and doesn’t look a bit the pretty-boy) and finally trying to do something with his life.

Splendor in the Grass (1961)

This one could have used the Douglas Sirk Touch. 

Natalie Wood and a young, doughy, Warren Beatty play Deanie and Bud, high school sweethearts in Kansas in the 1920’s. Being "good" kids, they struggle mightily against their hormonal urges. Maybe too mightily. At one point Bud collapses during a basketball game due to sexual repression, stricken with a mysterious illness that requires months of vitamin injections and sunlamp treatments. He fares somewhat better than Deanie, who ends up in a mental hospital. What is wrong with these people!?!

The supporting cast includes Pat Hingle (chewing the scenery) as Bud’s bombastic oilman father and Barbara Loden as his sister Ginny, forcibly returned home from Art School in Chicago after a marriage, an annulment and an abortion; she spends he her time laying around the house in her pajamas, strumming a ukulele. I guess she’s supposed to be a 1920’s version of a beatnik.

Not that any of the period details are at all accurate: Bud eventually goes off to Yale and marries a pizzeria waitress who, with her teased hair and frosted makeup, looks for all the world like Ronnie Spector.

Trivia: this is the movie from which the title character of Judy Blume’s book Deenie gets her name.