Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 157: The Final Days of Summer

There are several stars that keep cropping up during each decade and in the 1950s it's William Holden from the brilliant Sunset Boulevard to the melodramatic Love is a Many Splendored Thing he's excelled at playing male leads and the latest film Picnic is somewhere in the middle. Set over 24 hours in an idyllic Kansas town it features Holden's Hal Carter coming into town having stowed away on a freight train and is now eager to find his old college pal Alan Benson as he believes Benson's father will give him a job. Before finding Alan, Hal first encounters Alan's sweetheart Madge Owens and her bookish sister Millie. Alan initially offers Hal a job wanting to impress the college football hero, now that he has fallen on hard times but obviously he catches the eyes of both of the sisters with Millie suddenly discovering hormones and dressing up for Alan. The title of the film refers to the Labour Day picnic which signals the end of the summer and will be the last time for Madge and Alan to announce that they're going steady. Along with Hal, Alan and the Owen sisters the picnic also comes kindly old lady Mrs Potts, the single parent of the two girls, store owner Howard and his would-be love schoolteacher Rosemary. The film's pivotal scene is where Hal and Madge are dancing and a drunken Rosemary breaks it up wanting to prove she is still young and exposes him for what he really is in what felt like a scene from a Tennessee Williams story. After being blamed for getting Millie drunk he runs away with Alan now jealous of him he decides to skip town but the question is will Madge come with him?

Of all of these films I think this is the one in which Holden is fully showing off his sex symbol status and Hal does find any excuse to remove his shirt or have it ripped from him. To be fair he does add some substance to his physique portraying the fading jock who once used his looks to help him get by but now realises he should've worked harder and not flunked out. He has great chemistry with Kim Novak as Madge with the scene in which they dance being the film's most memorable as they sizzle and create jealousy from most of the other characters. Also worth a mention is Rosalind Russell as Rosemary a woman who transfers her own fears about growing old and alone onto the unstable Hal with her diatribe directed towards him being fairly brutal. Another plus point in terms of Picnic was the idea of this damaged character coming into this small town and changing everyone's lives within a 24 hour period. The downside was the fact that as there was so many characters some of them got little time to develop and that's true of the girl's mother played by Betty Field who essentially becomes a cliché full of worry and nagging in addition the music was a bit over the top for a film which was on the whole subtly filmed. Overall a great character-led piece which should've been nominated for more acting awards which gave a story of a man languishing as he readied himself for middle age.