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 Hal Carter is a drifter that has just gotten off a freight train on Labor Day
and is looking to start a new life. He's come to Kansas to get a job with his
old frat brother, Alan, whose family runs a granary. Things go wrong when "his
sexual magnetism attracts every woman in town" including Kim Novak. She plays
a nineteen year old beauty queen and is Alan's girlfriend. They note that this
film was nominated for six Oscars back in 1955 and there is also a glowing
quote from that Leonard Maltin guy again. 1955, 113 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
I was watching this movie and knew almost immediately that I was in for another
one of these sweaty, desperate epics about how life in a small town is full of
hypocrites, nosy old maids, and sweaty drifters that are drenched in the promise
of something better than what the small town was offering up to its population
of breathy starlets. I can't understand why Hollywood has to dwell on the
negative all the time. Why can't they ever do a movie that highlights the
positive aspects of such small town ideals as classism, expectations of elders,
and the way your life seems to wind inevitably toward something approximating a
living death, the longer you stay. I mean, gosh, these small towns usually
even have some type of festival annually where the same people go do the same
stuff every year to no good effect. If that isn't a celebration of man's
existence, I don't know what is. At least in this movie, they manage to
confine all their hip, west coast criticism to a single day in this small town
- Labor Day. The last day of summer, before everyone goes back to school and
the people that are stupid enough to still want a better life are just about
able to
forget about their wasted youth again, because they'll be too busy freezing
their
arse off for the next six months. In this little town inhabited by
over-the-hill stars like Rosalind Russell and young turks like Cliff Robertson,
the end of summer is capped off by that big celebration where everyone waits
with baited breath to see which of the town's young ladies will be crowned the
Queen of Neewollah. Even though you probably think that Neewollah is the name
of some Indian tribe the inhabitants tricked and/or killed to steal this land
200 years ago, it actually is Halloween spelled backwards. I was never to sure
what the significance of that was, but I immediately pegged this Neewollah deal
as being several notches below my own hometown's annual festival. I am of
course referring to Pancake Day. Now, several wannabe festivals have tried to
step up and take the title from Pancake Day over the years. There was Railroad
Days, Pirate Days and we even recall the brief moment that some yokel thought
we needed a Croatian Fest. Yeah, we need that as much as we need Croations.
Anyway, the highlight, just like in this movie, is when they crown the Pancake
Day Queen. Usually these gals are named Amber or April and they have really
big, blonde hair complete with dark roots. It shouldn't come as any surprise
that the Pancake Day Queen is affectionally called the Batter Bitch by the less
civic minded of our denizens. And that's really the only reason I watched
Picnic - so I could tell you about the Batter Bitch. Okay, I also watched it
for William Holden and Kim Novak, but after seeing them flail around in badly
miscast roles, I found myself drawn back to the story of the Batter
Bitch.  Holden, who gave memorable performances in movies like Stalag 17 and Sunset
Boulevard looks completely out of place as the drifter who is romancing the
nineteen year old character played by Kim Novak (Veritgo). Holden was 37 years
old when he made this movie and he looks at least that old, if not older.
Novak looks like young white trash in the film and her flat performance gave no
hint that she would be capable of something like the dual roles she had in
Hitchcock's Vertigo. Most of the movie was spent trying not to gag as Holden's
character tried to act about fifteen years younger than he really was. The
romance (such as it was) between him and Novak, came off as creepy, not
scandalous or intense. Holden's Hal Carter hops off a freight train on Labor
Day in the small town of one of his college buddies (class of '03 I'd wager).
His pal is Alan Benson (Cliff Robertson) and Alan's daddy owns a whole bunch of
grain elevators in town. Hal hopes to secure work with his buddy (preferably
an office job with a secretary) and finally settle down. He hooks up with
kindly old Mrs. Potts and offers to clean her yard if she'll give him some
food. She says that it's Labor Day and nobody is working, but she'll feed him
anyway. Hal insists on doing some yard work for her (Hey, how about cleaning
her pipes, too?) and this is the first time Hal loses his shirt. This movie
really stars William Holden's middle-aged chest more than anything is. I would
have to rate its performance as decent, being very tan, but it can't hide the
fact that it's about ten years past his prime, so while it is a bit muscular
and not fat by any means, it doesn't seem as tight as you would like for a role
like this. If you've ever lived in a small town, then you'd know what an
uproar a shirtless William Holden would cause if he was spotted in some old
bag's backyard getting all sweaty. The neighbors stare and gasp at this
towering slab of thirtysomething manhood and it doesn't take long for Hal to
waltz on over to where the youngest of the Owens girls is shooting some hoops
(WNBA, here I come!). He immediately hunks it up as her mother and her sister
appear. The younger girl is Millie and her older sister is Madge (Novak).
Their mother also rents a room to Rosalind Russell's school teacher character,
Rosemary, an old maid who is by far the most developed character in the
movie.  The mother is one of those clingy small town mothers that gets all up in arms
whenever glistening drifter hunks wander into her backyard and start hanging
out with her teenage daughters. Hal departs the premises to look up his old
buddy Alan Benson. Alan just so happens to be romancing Madge, so you can
pretty much see that there's going to be a problem when rich kid and beefy hobo
start lusting after the same girl. Over at Alan's house, he and Hal happily
reunite and Hal tells him that he would like a job at the grain elevators.
Alan takes him on a tour of the elevators and tells him that he'll have to work
his way up from the bottom as a grain scooper. Alan isn't an overt jerk or
anything, but he is one of those rich snots that act like they're entitled to
things because of their position in life. He thinks he identifies with the
workers because he worked there one summer before getting his sweet office gig,
but we all know that just below the pleasant "how do you do" exterior of the
workers, they just can't wait for there to be some type of accident in one of
the silos or something. We learn that Hal was a football player and that he
could have been an All-American but he flunked out of school in his third year.
He and Alan were in the same fraternity and that's how they became buddies.
Hal also tells Alan all about the adventures he's been having as he travelled
across this great country of ours. The best one comes straight out of the
pages of Penthouse when he starts spinning a yarn about how he got hooked up
with two babes and they had a big party in a motel room and eventually they
stole all his money when he wanted the party to stop. Alan, whose biggest
story is probably that one time they accidentally mixed some of that genetically
engineered corn in with the regular corn and got fined by the Department of
Agriculture, eats up Hal's tales of derring do and tells him that he should come
to the big picnic that they're having that evening. With the promise of
three-legged races, pie-eating contests (please, no jokes about Madge), and the
big election to see if Madge can make it over the top and finally get elected
queen, Hal can't very well refuse, can he? 
Back at the Owen house, we learn some more about Millie and Madge. This is all
you need to know. Madge is the pretty one. We know this because Millie
dresses as a tomboy and reads really heavy books. The paper boy also calls her
names, but he is always wearing one of those stupid hats with the bill turned
up and a little sideways, so he'd get beat up nowadays. Millie is going to
college and Madge is going to be queen. Naturally, each sister is jealous of
the other sister, though I would bet that Millie is probably more jealous of
Madge than vice versa. I mean, if you're already good looking, do you sit
around wishing you were smarter? Heck no! You're good looking so you don't
need to be smart! While Madge's mom is getting her dress ready for the picnic,
she starts talking to her about her romance with Alan. I'm paraphrasing a bit
here, but she basically tells Madge that she needs to give up the goods a
little bit at the picnic so that Alan will stay hooked on her and eventually
marry her. And then maybe Alan will buy somebody's mother a brand house with a
brand new HDTV or something, right, ma? This is most likely the kind of birds
and bees talk that goes on in small towns everywhere when the only guy in town
with any money is romancing your daughter. Finally, the time has come for
everyone to go to the picnic. Alan gives Hal a car to drive and they both show
up to pick up there dates. Alan is going with Madge and Hal is going with
Millie, further grossing out the audience. Howard Bevans also shows up to take
his date Rosemary, the schoolteacher. Howard runs a store across the river and
he's probably really the same age as Hal, but they dyed his hair gray so that
we'll be tricked into thinking that Hal isn't really closer to fifty than he is
to twenty. Rosemary and Howard see each other regularly, but their
relationship doesn't seem to be going anywhere in particular, at least until
Rosemary gets wasted at the picnic and starts dropping the "marry me or else"
ultimatums. She's not the only one to get wasted at the picnic as an underage
Millie hits the whiskey hard enough to get sick and get Hal in trouble, even
though it was Howard's hooch. The picnic ends badly for all involved when a drunken Rosemary rips Hal's shirt
(gee, that was a surprise) and cuts a promo on him that the audience has been
wishing someone would say all night long. That he is old and needs to quit
pretending not to be. Basically, she calls him on the fact that since he
rolled into to town that he's just been hunking around and expecting everyone
to be all over him and all that jazz. Of course, she says all this when he
doesn't want to dance with her, only with Madge. I will note that when he and
Madge dance that some call it a classic scene of passion, but I found myself
giggling uncontrollable as Holden was showing these nasty hip shaking moves to
Millie and Madge shows up and starts doing them and clapping her hands like
some kind of gypsy under a full moon or something. Somehow or other Hal ends
up with Madge and on the lam from the cops (something about a fight at Alan's
house) and we get another funny scene where Hal goes undercover as a waterfall
(I think shirt was off, but it was hard to tell). There's a bunch of drama at
the end when Madge is literally being pulled in two different directions by her
mother and by Hal. Hal hops another train out of town and Madge has to make up
her mind whether to follow him. An overheated, overrated movie that is
completely botched because William Holden is and looks so damn old. Cliff
Robertson's character is supposed to have been in college with Hal and he looks
the right age and it doesn't gross you out to have him pawing Madge, but Holden
looks like one of Alan's dad's friends or something. Novak doesn't distinguish
herself either in this movie, standing around posing and trying to affect these
looks of lust for Holden. Hal doesn't come off as an iconoclastic rebel that
represents the freedom of the individual and he isn't the guy that can't grow
up or has been dealt a raw deal by life or can't fit in or whatever. He's just a
loser that has nothing to offer except that he can still get horny for teenage
girls whenever he sees 'em. There's nothing really between Madge and Hal except animal lust and you have
absolutely no belief that if these two ended up together that they would stay
together. This movie would have you believe that they were representative of
the restlessness of youth and the need to strike out in the world and seek your
own way, in spite of what others (parents, town, traditions) had already mapped
out for you, but the shallowness with which these characters are drawn (Madge
is ready to leave everything she's ever known for a guy she knows nothing about
and has only spent a few hours with and she has no conflict about doing so)
makes the story of these two ring false and feel like it was simply coasting on
the perceived charisma of the stars involved (they display none of it in this
movie). There's a lot of shouting about love and life and sweaty chests and
heaving bosoms and sideways glances from townspeople, but it isn't one of those
stories that illuminates anything in the human condition beyond the fact that
old losers still have the hots for young hotties. A script that relied less on
histrionics (and thirty-seven year old chests) and more on making Hal and Madge
people instead of descriptions (passionate drifter, small town beauty) could
have made this the commentary on small town life and the unbridled passion of
youth that they were apparently shooting for. Probably worth a rental for
Russell's heartbreaking performance of the old maid who wakes up to the fact
that
her
life is passing her by (Hal and Madge should have been given the layers
hers had).
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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