Picnic (1955)

I've always loved this movie, and always thought of the Inge plays as capturing middle-class America in the middle of America, and in the middle of the 20th Century. (Note, how his plays almost always take place in small mid-western or western towns and how well they capture this time and place of a bygone era.) More than any other playwrite, Inge lets me remember my time and place in American history. There was a type of drama there that had been untapped by other plays. That is, not all drama occurred in NYC, LA, or in old westerns as movies, of that time, might have you believe.

More than the dance scenes of this movie, I enjoy the way Joshua Logan (and James Wong Howe) took time to focus in on the picnic itself with the games, people, etc. It is interesting to imagine how this Labor Day picnic might have been filmed.      

Rosalind Russell was great, here, as the spinster school teacher desperate to get married before it was too late. Howard seems to be her last chance.

The Madge Owens/Hall Carter relationship mirrored that of Rosemary Sidney/Howard Bevans in some respects.   

I also loved Vera Felton as Miss Potts and her conversation with Flo (Betty Field):
The powerful score was also great, as Novak ran after Holden at the end of the movie---powerful stuff. 

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I never miss a chance to plead with the forces that be to TRY HARD to restore and digitize Dark at the Top of the Stairs. It is another Inge play that I don't believe has been restored and will be impossible to watch unless it is restored and digitized. I think that the only living cast member that might push for this are Angela Lansbury and  Shirley Knight. 


Love and agree with all your wonderful, even beautiful comments, kijii, especially about the small midwestern town milieu of a certain era. You've got it so right! Inge was actually always writing about his hometown of Independence, Kansas. It was his blessing and his curse, so to speak, but it stood by him well creatively.

And, like you, I so wish Warner Brothers would release The Dark at the Top of the Stairs on DVD. I can't understand why they haven't - or didn't years ago. I have a VHS I recorded off the air back in the days when they occasionally ran it on tv, but that's starting to deteriorate.  And you're right about Knight and Lansbury, though they are older now and probably have a lot of other things on their mind. I try to attend the William Inge Festival in his hometown every few years. The last time I went Shirley Knight was there and they played Dark, and then she talked about it. That was a treat. And I one year at the DGA Awards I had a chance to tell director Delbert Mann how much I liked the film and how much it had meant in my life.

One last story about that film: I went to an event to raise money for the Actor's Fund in LA several years ago and Angela was there, backstage seeing some friends I was waiting to see. I will always regret that I didn't tell her in person this thing I'm about to tell you now, but I didn't know her personally and didn't want to intrude on her conversation with my friends. So later, when I was leaving, her husband and I were headed to our cars that just happened to be parked side by side. And I asked him if he would please tell Angela how much I always loved her in her role of Mavis Pruitt. I swear his face lit up like the sun with a huge smile, and he said, "Oh, of course!  That's one of her favorite roles of all time."  Well, needless to say that made us both very happy.