It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

This is my favorite movie of this time period and I watch it every time it comes on. I'm a boomer and this movie brings not only the heat and repressed and not so repressed sexuality many reviewers comment on but more importantly, it juxtaposes it with the innocence and naivete that were a part of America, especially small town America through the end of the 70's. Everything from the opening shots of this Midwestern small town, to the house, and especially the Labor day picnic take you back into this time of innocence. The opening sequences are so powerful in evoking that time period that I can smell the marigolds in the garden and feel the warmth of the sun beating down on William Holden's bare chest as he sees Madge for the first time. Even The look on Helen, the elderly neighbors, face when she sees also sees him reminds me that the sense of romance in life, the knight on the white horse that all girls grew up with, is lost in this technological age. Every woman in this movie hungers for romance, with the underlying sexual tension not nearly as important. The sense of wonder and discovery we had then with our first romantic kiss becomes palpable as Madge and he dance. Their bodies barely touching, but like the characters, you can imagine what it will feel like when they finally do touch. I think this is the thing Inge brings to all his works, never more evident than in this movie and in Splendor in the Grass, this sense of innocence and naivete, romance and our yearning for it, head to head with the realities of what happens to the innocence if romance leads unbridled. But Inge always leaves us unafraid of the romance, even if it leads to the worst, you would never trade one moment of that feeling, even if you knew what was ahead. Watch this movie, it does not disappoint.

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.

I've always very much enjoyed this film about a drifter (William Holden) who wanders into a small, dormant Kansas town and over the course of only a day breathes new life into it and stirs passions among its residents. "Picnic," has its faults. And there are many: the miscasting of William Holden, who was far too old (37) to play a young drifter looking to find his way in life, Kim Novak's breathy performance that takes on a mannequin like quality which leaves no room for the necessary chemistry between her and Holden, Rosalind Russell playing to the rafters (although she does nail her most important scene – the one where she lashes out at Holden), and finally the way the musical score pounds loudly as the melodrama is poured on in the last act."Picnic" also lacks the lyrical quality of the great Douglas Sirk melodramas of the same era ("Imitation of Life"), but maybe its nostalgia for a time and place gone by or the way director Joshua Logan nails the sleepy life of an American town that is just waiting eagerly to be awoken. Or maybe it is James Wong Howe's brilliant widescreen cinematography or the wonderful performances from Verna Felton, Susan Strasberg and Arthur O'Connell that allows me to forgive the film's faults and treasure it for what it is: a beautifully shot melodrama that perfectly captures a slice of Americana.

This picture could be an artifact of the naive and childish romantic notions of the fifties and the plight of women at that time. The audience is asked to suspend reality on too many levels, the first being William Holden as a drop-dead gorgeous young stud. At 37, Holden was prematurely old from alcohol. Even with his shaved chest (which was supposed to make him look younger), he seems closer to 50. All of the gusto and even the lust are forced. Hal would have been an ideal role for Paul Newman or Marlon Brando at that time; maybe Joshua Logan just hated method actors. It would be understandable as to why Kim Novak, the Village Beauty, would dump the richest boy in town (Cliff Robertson) for a loser with no prospects. He would need to have overpowering sex appeal while Holden just appears used-up. In this situation, you can't help but feel for Betty Field's character who knows Madge's life will be a disaster once she marries Hal. The best outcome is that Madge will divorce him before she loses her looks. How audiences, at that time, could consider her union with Hal a happy ending is symptomatic of how delusional and pathetic the nineteen fifties were.