Word: picnicers
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...Picnic. William Inge's play about a husky athlete (William Holden) who bounces around a small town like a loose ball, while the ladies (Rosalind Russell, Kim Novak) fumble excitedly for possession. (TIME...
...Boston: Danny Kaye shows flashes of brilliance and mediocrity in The Court Jester at the Paramount and Fenway. Picnic is unpleasing because it is dull and Mid-western, though Susie Strasburg is infinitely Central Park West at Loew's State and Orepheum. Diabolique is still the biggest secret since John Thomson spent the weekend at the White House. At the Beacon Hill. Carousel has russet-thatched Gordon MacRae, which is more than anyone could ask, at Keith's Memorial. The Rose Tatoo is all AnnaMagnani's at the Met, which says ". . . Every week is a record. The crowds! The cheers...
...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...
...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...
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...