Picnic - 1955

“Picnic” (1955) takes place on Labor Day, in a Midwest small town. In the middle of the country, in the middle of the 1950s, we arrive at a point in the lives of the characters in this film when they are both looking back and looking forward. For most, it seems their prospects are as flat as the horizon.

William Holden plays Hal, an unrealistic dreamer and likable screw-up who arrives in town riding a boxcar, with little more than his father’s boots to his name. Holden is often judged by many as being too old to play this boyish character, and perhaps that is true. Already having successfully played more mature men of the world, one can sense in some scenes what might have been Mr. Holden’s discomfort at playing a man in his 20s with the emotional maturity of a teenager. But with a little makeup around the eyes, a little combing of his hair in bangs over a slightly receding hairline, Holden does fine showing us Hal’s loveable foolishness, his pathetic braggadocio, and brings a certain wistful pang of remorse to the inevitable harsh self-knowledge of his own failure. Perhaps a younger, less experienced actor would not have brought the enormous expression of regret we see in Hal’s face, a self knowledge that only time brings.

Besides, William Holden can heave the entire body of young Susan Strasberg over his head and carry her with one hand in a picnic race, and this is pretty impressive for a man in his late 30s.

Susan Strasberg shines as the brainiac teenager Millie, rebellious and restlessness, and deeply jealous of her pretty older sister, Madge, played by Kim Novak. “Madge is the pretty one!” Miss Strasberg wails, her teenage pain acute, with no one and nothing to comfort her.




I believe it was in this movie that director Joshua Logan said of Kim Novak that she “wears her beauty like a crown of thorns.” A pretty well-repeated comment of Kim Novak by now, and in this role, remarkably true. Miss Novak is the anxious beauty queen Madge, who is as equally jealous of her younger sister because of the younger girl’s roundly acknowledged intellect. Her geeky little sister is more confident, dares to be more brash, and is headed off to college. Madge is going nowhere. Her only hope for a happy future, at least according to her worried mother, played by Betty Field, is for her to marry the rich boy in town.

The rich boy, son of the town’s grain elevator company owner, is played by Cliff Robertson. No struggle for Madge to snag him, because he’s already after her. The problem is Madge. She’s deeply insecure about her much-proclaimed beauty, wanting instead to be appreciated for more than that. Her fear is that there isn’t much more to her. She’s not really in love with Robertson, and she, a girl who has grown up fatherless by the railroad tracks, feels out of place among his wealthy set. And then William Holden arrives in town.

There are a lot of interesting comparisons to make to “Peyton Place”, which we covered last time. Both reflect the turmoil of the individual’s fitting into a tight-knit, and often judgmental community. Both, though launching the plot off the sexual desires of the youth, also reflect the emotional crises of the older generations with poignancy.


Rosalind Russell plays the spinster schoolteacher who boards with Betty Field’s family, and plays her like a force of nature, occasionally chewing the scenery. Footloose and fancy free, she boasts of relationships she has broken off to keep her independence, but we soon learn the only man willing to keep company with her these days is the befuddled Arthur O’Connell, one of the terrific character actors of this era. He is a confirmed old bachelor who brings liquor to liven up the party, and contentedly comforts himself in his bachelor apartment with his 21-inch TV. I love how his tie is too short.

Their relationship is old, stale, but livens up after a climatic scene when Miss Russell paws Holden in a desperate cry for attention, and afterward she realizes tearfully, with repentance and in some panic that Mr. O’Connell is the only man left to her who will keep her from being alone. She begs him to save her from a life of spinsterhood.

One of the interesting differences in “Picnic” to “Peyton Place” is the role of the mother of the lead characters. Lana Turner is the mother who bore her child out of wedlock and afterward spends considerable energy keeping her teenaged daughter from any kind of intimate contact with any boy, who warns her of sex and accuses her of sex, but will not otherwise talk about it.

Betty Field in “Picnic”, however (in contrast to her own role in “Peyton Place” as the tragic figure so beaten by the circumstances of her life that she cannot comfort a brutalized daughter, only obsess over what the neighbors will think) practically throws Kim Novak at the rich boy. Field questions her daughter on how far she lets Cliff Robertson go on dates, not to warn her off intimacy before marriage, but to encourage it so that there will be a marriage. We can see Novak’s embarrassment with this discussion, and Betty Field’s determined desperation.

In both films we have the camera shots from high above, a point at which the characters can look down on the town and consider it. In “Peyton Place” it is Russ Tamblyn and Diane Varsi on the top of the mountain looking down upon the town. In “Picnic” it is William Holden and Cliff Robertson on the top of the grain elevator, a symbol of his family’s wealth and power, overlooking this Kansas town. Still, it is difficult to see the town even from this vantage, just as we might have to stand far back from a painting in a museum to really appreciate it. Some of these characters in both these movies will need to actually get out of town to see it for what it is.

The climatic scene in both films takes place at the Labor Day picnic, which is as fun to watch as it is useful for helping the plot to unfold. All the lead characters in “Picnic” participate in various games and races. In one race the ladies are told they need a male partner to compete in a rather servile-looking ring-toss game, and Rosalind Russell crows, “I’ve got a man!” to the defeated looks of the ladies who don’t.

The evening brings the final event of the day, the choosing of the festival queen, in this case “Neewollah”, which is Halloween spelled backwards. Kim Novak is floated down the river on a swan boat wearing a crown and cape while the townspeople pay homage in what might look silly to an outsider, but we are no longer outsiders here. We can smile at the foolish pageantry, and understand the need for it at the same time.

Mr. Holden is captivated at the sight of her, but mostly at what she represents, a grandeur he seeks for himself. We see Cliff Robertson now has a rival. In the next scenes over the course of the evening, a lot flip-flops and lives are changed forever. Relationships break off, new ones start, and Kim Novak, who has been eyeing Holden with fascination since she met him, now finds the guts to make the biggest decision of her life.

Probably the most interesting aspect in this film of what today might be considered rampant sexism, where the women are regarded, and regard themselves, as essentially worthless if they do not attract and keep a man, is the blatant exploitation of William Holden’s masculinity. He is ogled and pawed, his clothes are ripped from him by a desperate older woman. He is shirtless and leered at by the ladies and by the camera. He is Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe in his vulnerability as a sex object.

And he is miserable. Like Kim Novak. It’s a sweet idea that the comfort they seem to bring each, their mutual woes of not being appreciated for their inner worth, will make a bridge on which they can build a lasting romance. But the film carries with it an irresistible reality that maybe happily-ever-after is a matter of degree. When Mr. Holden all but demands Novak follow him when he must hurriedly leave town ahead of the police, we may wonder if he is ever going to grow up and stop thinking only about himself. We may suspect that Miss Novak is walking into as hopeless and unsatisfying a relationship as her parents’. But we don’t really know.

We don’t really know if Roz Russell and Arthur O’Connell are really going to make a life together in his bachelor apartment with his 21-inch television. She will quit teaching, which she wants very much to do, and will likely have to anyway as many teachers in many areas of the country were still required to be single at this time. They leave for they honeymoon, she ecstatic, he dazed.

We are left with Betty Field, the well-meaning and ambitious mother of two daughters as different as night and day, with different needs and different personalities. A woman who takes in borders to make ends meet, because her own marriage failed many years ago. We are left with the gentle older neighbor Miss Potts, played by Verna Felton, who cares for the demanding and unseen mother that requires all her energy, all her time. Just as in “Peyton Place”, the older generations are seen as having paid a price, and one of the most touching moments in the film is when Verna Felton and Betty Field sit pensively on a swing at the town picnic, the evening shadows lowering, and Felton confesses that just being able to watch Field’s daughters grow up from her vantage point of her own backyard made her lonely life easier.

This is a woman denied her own family possibly by the very responsibility of caring for her invalid mother. How poignant it is to show an elderly woman calling to an even older woman, “Yes, Mama, I’m coming,” with no resentment, only concern. Miss Felton has made peace with her life, even as she lives vicariously through everyone else’s. It is she who first welcomes Holden into their lives, fusses over him and makes him comfortable. He playfully calls her his girl. It is she who first notices the attraction between Holden and Novak, and she wistfully, with wonder and captivation, but without an ounce of Miss Russell’s jealousy, comments, “Aren’t they graceful?”

Though Kim Novak is warned by Betty Field that time is flying, and she is at the peak of her bloom and needs to pursue marriage with the rich boy while she is still desirable, we are reminded that in Field herself, and in young Susan Strasberg, and in Verna Felton, time is flying for every generation. It brings to mind the old poem about gathering rosebuds while ye may, and it applies to everyone: “To the Virgins, to make much of Time,” by Robert Herrick.

GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he 's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he 's to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry:
For having lost but once your prime,
You may for ever tarry.

Verna Felton would identify more with this than either of Betty Field’s girls. But they’ll understand in time, in their own ways, with their own regrets. This is what makes the film interesting, is that it doesn’t really end. The audience decides what the ending will be. Because it is Labor Day, the summer, at least, is ending, the movie showing us a race against time that is an allegory for the broader issues.

Below, have a look at the famous dance sequence with William Holden and Kim Novak at the picnic. Enjoy your Labor Day, and may the eventual evening shadows fall gently on you and yours.

In Search of Peyton Place

(Above have a look at the trailer, and also a newsreel of the Hollywood premiere.)

The movie “Peyton Place” (1957) opens with the joyous sound of church carillon chimes and stunning shots of New England pastoral scenes. The opening shots and score exude a sense of triumph and soulful beauty. A remarkable, clever, and somewhat astounding introduction to a story that had been up to that time one of the most controversial novels ever written, banned in most states and some countries for obscenity. Even today, the phrase “Peyton Place” carries the meaning of a morally corrupt community, a den of secrets, a bastion of promiscuity. You’d never know it by the inspiring travelogue over the opening credits.

The first few minutes of the film are really quite magnificent for establishing the setting, and the premise of the story. An outsider to this New England small town, who will be its new high school principal, drives through the countryside on his way to Peyton Place. Passing farms and fields, he arrives at a train crossing and must wait for the train to pass. He glances over to the dilapidated shacks by the tracks, and sees the downtrodden Cross family, whose story is to figure prominently in the film. He drives on, and we are left for the moment with Betty Field, the careworn mother trying to persuade her grown son not to run away from his violent, drunken stepfather, played by the wonderful Arthur Kennedy. We meet her lovely teenaged daughter Selena, played by Hope Lange, and when the slobbering Arthur Kennedy places a heavy hand on Miss Lange’s shoulder for a moment and she shudders, we have a premonition as to how things are going to play out for this wretched family.


We rejoin the new high school principal Mr. Rossi, played by Lee Philips, in his car again as he drives the rain-washed streets of the proper little town, passing the house of Lloyd Nolan, who plays the town doctor, as he comes out in his bathrobe to pick up his morning newspaper. The Doc shows us the headline about US neutrality threatened by Hitler, and we know we are in the early 1940s, just before America’s entry into World War II.

It is as perfect an opening five minutes a movie can get for immersing the audience in the place, the time, and the mood, setting us up for what’s going to happen as the film unfolds.

I would imagine, though, that most people going to see this movie when it was released in 1957 actually did know what was going to happen in the story; or at least thought they did. So many read the book.

There probably had never been up until that time a novel more vigorously criticized and yet more familiar to the public which avowed disgust for it, and claimed disinterest in it on moral grounds. Many called it a “dirty” book, but others evidently found it irresistible. The build-up for the book and the movie were tremendous.

Grace Metalious, the young author of “Peyton Place” was called the Pandora in Blue Jeans in the flood of publicity surrounding the publication of her novel because of her habit of dressing in jeans and flannel shirts, her hair tied back in a ponytail. It added to her intrigue, because she did not look like a glamorous all-knowing town gossip, yet gossip, some of it actually true, was what she peddled in her novel of seamy goings on in a New England mill town.

Her first published novel, the book came out when she was 33 years old. It stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for several months. It made her famous. It made her wealthy, for a time. In the wake of her success, however, there came a degree of pressure that she was perhaps unable to bear. Always a mercurial personality, somewhat self-pitying, obsessive and undisciplined, she died of alcoholism before she was 40. Part of the strain of her success was the ostracism by her community of Gilmanton, New Hampshire for their representation in “Peyton Place,” as much as for the lurid content of her book.

She didn’t help matters when publicizing her novel. In an interview with syndicated columnist Hal Boyle, she noted of Gilmanton, “To a tourist these towns look as peaceful as a postcard picture…but if you go beneath that picture, it’s like turning over a rock with your foot -- all kinds of strange things crawl out.”

This is an intriguing statement to make in view of the film’s beautiful postcard shots of an idyllic New England. We have the voiceover narration by the character of Allison MacKenzie, played very well with a great deal of natural talent by newcomer Diane Varsi, “Time was told not by the clock or the calendar, but by the seasons.” Anyone who has ever lived in New England knows how true this is. Varsi continues to speak in poetic terms of the seasons, and then adds, “There was a fifth season of love, and only the wise or the lucky ones knew where to find it.”

Compare this with how the book actually begins, “Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle…”

The lyrical narration of the film stands apart from the earthy language of the book, and there are so many other differences that illustrate a lot about what film was willing to accept at that time. The anxious, shy boy Norman Page, played by Russ Tamblyn in the film, is made miserable by his possessive mother. His mother’s relationship with Norman in the book is much more twisted and more explicitly so. In the novel, sexual assignations are obviously more frank. It has been suggested by present-day writers, including biographer Emily Toth in her “Inside Peyton Place” (Doubleday & Co., NY 1981) that Grace Metalious represents a beginning to the feminist movement, in part because of her willingness to address mature themes in a frank manner.

There may certainly be some element of that in the legacy of her novel, but I’m not sure I would go so far as to call Metalious a feminist herself. She boastfully admitted a dependence on husbands and lovers, and even bitterly referred to herself as having lost her womanhood when she underwent an hysterectomy. I think in Grace Metalious we have a writer who was not particularly crusading in terms of feminism, or class tension, or gutsy in depicting sex, but simply a woman who unselfconsciously wrote about what interested her, in the everyday speech she used herself. One of the strengths of her novel is its unselfconsciousness.

The film is the opposite in this respect, it is quite obviously self conscious and needs to toe the mark to acceptable social standards in the way the book does not. (Though even Metalious was reined in by her publishers and agent when they changed a key element in the first draft of her novel. She had originally written Selena Cross as getting raped by her biological father, Lucas Cross. To Ms. Metalious’ dismay, though the rape was allowed to be left in, they insisted that Lucas Cross be changed to her stepfather, rather than her father. Rape of a teenaged girl by a male guardian may be ugly, but by a father was evidently unacceptable. It did not seem to matter that this was one of a few episodes in the book that Metalious based on an actual event and real people.)

Other elements in the story, pregnancy by rape, abortion, suicide, murder were either diminished or attempted to be treated tastefully in the film. The shock of Allison MacKenzie on the discovery that her deceased father and her mother were never married remains, but the film’s manner of revealing this scandal later on in the story I think is more effective than it coming out early in the novel.

One thing the novel loses in the translation to film is the undercurrent of ethnic and class tension. The town’s largest employer, the textile mill owned by Leon Ames, whose spoiled son cavorts with the high school trollop, is represented as a backdrop to the story, showing us this is a mill town, but we get very little of the labor versus management, rich people versus poor people in the film than we do in the novel.

Grace Metalious said of the film that she was “pleasantly surprised, but I thought it was too sugar coated.” Well, yeah. It seems with a beguiling innocence Ms. Metalious thought her novel, which echoed and taught an entire generation of teenagers about sexual awakening, would be transferred to the screen literally.

Instead, producer Jerry Wald and director Mark Robson created something that was a hybrid of the novel, but that stood apart on its own, was its own creation.

When selecting a filming location, the town of Gilmanton, New Hampshire adamantly refused to have anything to do with the movie, because it felt that the book had already given the town a bad name. However, though some characters and some incidents told in the novel came from local town stories that Metalious had heard, Metalious admitted that probably 75% of the book was written before she’d ever moved to Gilmanton. Originally she came from the much larger industrial city of Manchester, New Hampshire, and the book depicts a composite of a New England mill town. She actually set the fictional Peyton Place along the Connecticut River, nowhere near Gilmanton.

Where then, is Peyton Place? It’s not Woodstock, Vermont either, a town farther up the Connecticut River that resembled what Metalious described, but refused to let Hollywood film, and brand, their town. Finally, Camden, Maine, a seaside village with no resemblance to Peyton Place in the novel, was chosen not only for its quintessential New England beauty, but its willingness (along with Rockland, and Belfast) to be portrayed as the sinful town.

Over 1,700 locals signed up to be extras in the film. So much for scandal.

The famous Whitehall Inn is depicted in the film. Here’s my photo compared to the movie scene. Here’s a link to my post on Edna St. Vincent Millay at the Whitehall on my New England Travels blog.



One opening overhead shot here looks a lot to me like Boothbay Harbor, Maine, but I can’t find any mention that any shots of Boothbay Harbor were used in the film. Maybe some of our readers can clarify that.

Here is the famous scene of Norman and Allison on the hill overlooking Peyton Place. It is actually Mount Battie in Camden. Here is my photo as it looks today, and from the film. It is truly one of the most lovely sights, and if you ever find yourself in Down East Maine, take a side trip up the auto road and treat yourself to a picnic in paradise.

Speaking of picnics, the film’s Labor Day picnic gives us a cheerful glimpse of small-town togetherness, (barbershop quartets and gluttonous little boys eating more than they should) glossing over the undercurrent of tension, underscoring the importance of the town’s apparently only mill to the local economy, and sets us up for more crisis and conflict.

The film deftly covers, if less frank and in less detail than the novel, a stream of subtle realities about conformity and the consequences of stepping outside what is acceptable. Though the younger actors, particularly Hope Lange, who is touching as the vulnerable Selena, have the weight of society on them, the older generations have an equal part in suffering the consequences of scandal. The small, but moving side story of spinster teacher Mildred Dunnock (last seen here in “I Want You” - 1951) getting cheated on her promotion to principal is one of the film’s many important subplots that are handled well and tell us much about the community with a light touch.

Interestingly, this movie made in 1957 about the early 1940s carries the veneer of nostalgia to it. A cozy, but not condescending, nostalgia. Mostly accurate, there are only a few costume choices which look more like 1957 than 1940. When we see the high school senior dance at the gym, with a banner lauding the class of 1941, we may well cringe with foreboding (as we did not in “Life Begins for Andy Hardy” in this post), that in six months the U.S. will be at war and some of these characters may be war casualties.

A lot happens in the film, but it flows so well, and so remarkably gently, that it remains entertaining throughout and one may actually forget the novel’s lurid reputation because the film is a thing apart. It’s fun to recognize individuals in the large cast, like Lorne Greene as the snide prosecuting attorney, and teen heartthrob David Nelson fresh from TV’s “Ozzie and Harriet” to play Hope Lange’s boyfriend.

Is the film the real Peyton Place? It was very well received, and made the novel perhaps more respectable, therefore making it more popular. Grace Metalious, though she wanted to move on to other projects, went back to the well and wrote a sequel, which was made into another movie (other TV incarnations followed), but this project she frankly admitted was only for the money. She could never really get away from her creation.

But perhaps her creation stopped being hers once it got into the hands of those teenagers and housewives, and all the readers who made it second to “Gone With the Wind” in books sold. Today, few have read the novel and many, thanks to TV, have seen the movie.

Gilmanton, New Hampshire probably need not have worried about “Peyton Place” ruining their town’s reputation, since Peyton Place quickly morphed into Everytown, USA. The film often diligently reminds us it is set in New England with the actors using a light New England-sounding long “ah” sound to vowels that is, if not totally accurate, is certainly enough. Norman is called Naahman by everybody.

It’s probably best when films suggest an accent rather than to try to completely replicate it, because our regional accents are so diverse, that audiences in another part of the country might not catch what is said. In the opening moments of the film when the new principal drives through the countryside and asks a farmer driving a horse-drawn plow for directions, listen to the farmer’s response in his authentic Yankee accent. Could you listen to that for two and a half hours? Particularly if you were from St. Louis, Tallahassee, or Cheyenne? I think not.

The only locals who seem not to use a New England accent are factory owner Leon Ames, who sounds southern, and Lana Turner as Allison MacKenzie’s mother Constance, who makes no attempt and also seems rather more glamorous than the average citizen of Peyton Place. Another actress might have added more depth to the role, though Miss Turner was big name whose stardom, and tragically coincidental real-life scandal, likely added welcome publicity for the film. Lana Turner, unlike many of the principle actors, never traveled to Camden, Maine to film her scenes. We see her strolling a lot past rear-screen projection.

The film ends with its own courtroom drama, with Selena on trial for the murder of her stepfather. Lloyd Nolan defends Selena by accusing the town of neglect, “She couldn’t trust us with the truth.”

“We’re all prisoners of each other’s gossip.”

“Our best young people leave as soon as they’re old enough to pay for the price of a bus ticket.”

“We’re a small town but a prosperous one, and yet we allow tar paper shacks to stand.”

He laments the community’s failure to look after its own. The film ends with another idyllic shot of a tree-covered street lined by houses and white picket fences, two kids lazily bicycling by, with another voiceover by Allison MacKenzie “We finally discovered that season of love. It is only found in someone else’s heart. Right now someone you know is looking everywhere for it, and it’s in you.”

A sweet and gentle way to end a movie based on a novel banned as obscene in several states and some countries. Where is Peyton Place, really? Somewhere back in the 1950s, when things were changing, and we knew even then nothing would be the same?

You might look for it in the “Peyton Place Archives” of the Camden Public Library.

Grace Metalious is buried in a far corner of a Gilmanton, New Hampshire cemetery. For all her resentment of small town oppression, she said in a 1961 interview, “I live there because I couldn’t stand to live anywhere else…in Gilmanton I don’t have to be part of the town.”

Incongruous? There’s a lot of that going around. Come back next Monday when the town picnic moves to the Midwest. Until then, below we have the idyllic ending to “Peyton Place”.


Here’s an interesting article by Sarah Schweitzer from the Boston Globe on the 50th anniversary of the publication of “Peyton Place.”

Grace Metalious is quoted in this post from the above-mentioned “Inside Peyton Place”.

For more on Camden, Maine filming locations, have a look at this website and also here.

For more on Grace Metalious, have a look at this article in Vanity Fair.

Labor Day "Picnic" at "Peyton Place"

For the next two posts, we’re going to tackle two films with a few elements in common, but how much of this is due to coincidence and how much due to the prevailing social winds of the late 1950s, I leave you to decide.


That they both include pivotal, and very entertaining scenes at community Labor Day picnics is certainly a coincidence (which both showcase dueling barbershop quartets), but there’s a lot more going on than picnics, and the community at large is an ever-present, one might suggest omnipresent, force in the stories of these two films.

We’re marking Labor Day and small-town life through the films “Peyton Place” (1957), and “Picnic” (1955).

Both are set in small towns. Both involve a soap-opera style telling, tiered interwoven stories of different generations of characters. Sexual awakenings. Middle-aged yearnings. Small-town prejudices and stifling judgment. A fear of scandal. Even labor versus management issues. The rich town scions, and the people struggling from the houses by the railroad tracks. For some characters, a need to fit in to the small town life, a desire to remain sheltered by it. For others, a need to escape to a broader, more diverse, more challenging world.


One represents a New England mill town, and the other an agriculturally-based town in the Midwest. They are like fraternal twins. Both films are heavy on location shooting and give us a great sense of place. We know where we are. We see the outside, the tangible very well, the solid pictures of American Main Street and back yards. These films try to give us a picture of their inner turmoil as well, but that is intangible and tricky to photograph.


And both films, coincidentally, feature Betty Field as the careworn mother of troubled teenaged daughters. She is the Midwestern abandoned wife and mother seeking upward mobility for her daughter through marriage. She is New England drudge, the wife of the town drunk, who suffers agonies over his brutality, and even more over the horror of what people will think. In both movies, she is the victim both of her husband and her own apathy. In both movies, living by the railroad tracks signifies her place in her rigid society.

Was there really such universality in America in the 1950s, such homogenous experiences? Or did we unwittingly create that all-purpose template just to tell the story, which has now become textbook 1950s Americana?


Both films originated from dynamic non-film worlds, “Picnic” from the Broadway stage, and “Peyton Place” from a blockbuster novel. Film changed them, because film uses its own language and puts its own spin on stories. Film also has, or did have at one time, a sometimes unspoken, and sometimes shouted out loud, requirement to not offend the public.

I don’t believe either of these films could be made today, not simply because each in its own way is somewhat dated, but mainly because of what offended the public then and what does not offend it now. The power that lies in these two films is the way they consciously reflected their era, and also held a questioning mirror up to it. They flirted somewhat coyly with questioning what was accepted as appropriate.

We commonly hear the term “PC” today and sometimes bristle that the constraints of being “politically correct” are hypocritical and oppressive. However, back in the supposed comfortable world of 1950s America, when men were men, women were women, homosexuals were whispered about, and racial minorities were mostly invisible (being invisible perhaps a knee-jerk remedy to offset the outright stereotyping in films of previous decades), there was a far greater and insidious tippy-toeing effort not to challenge the mores of society that makes any effort at being “PC” today pale in comparison.

Defying this conformity carried heavier punishment, and its governance occasionally bordered on persecution. Not rocking the boat socially or politically, or by prevailing standards, morally, was the oppressive guiding rule, the obsessive-compulsive guideline of screenwriters, directors, producers, distributors, theater managers, and the public they provided entertainment to, from the Congressmen down to the paperboy. Any toe over the line could ruin the actor’s career, get the director fired, the ad campaign pulled, the threat of legal action for the studio, or even jail for the screenwriter.


Perhaps that’s why these two films were so entertaining, and enlightening for their day, and why they remain entertaining if only for their nostalgic value. They were films about small towns and regular folks that visually showed what was pretty and idyllic, and through the script showed what was repressive and ugly.

They may not seem terribly daring today, but they were filmed when it was okay to be a little seamy in movies about gangsters and criminals. But not about Main Street. As cleaned up as these films are not to offend too much, they still dared to suggest not everybody was happy.

One of the dangers the characters face in both films is public scandal, what the neighbors will think. Today, conversely, we may not even know our neighbors very well, let alone care what they think.

At least when it comes to social propriety. One may still feel the brunt of the neighbors’ ostracism, vandalism, or even physical threat if one disagrees with the neighbors’ politics. Social bullying, such as see with “town hall” thugs carrying weapons which they imagine give credence to their opinions, has gone far beyond whispering about the neighbor girl and what she does in the woods with the neighbor boy.

These two films, in some ways much more than even some of the classic films of the 1930s, are very topical for their era. For all their supposed universality in depicting small-town America, they really are locked in that time, like souvenirs in a scrapbook.

They are also, to some extent, fabrications.

They had meaning and influence on the society they reflected at the time, but we might wonder, did these towns, this America, ever really exist?

With Labor Day just around the corner, celebrate with “Peyton Place” and “Picnic” this Thursday and next Monday.

Now Playing - Once Upon a Time - 1944

This ad for “Once Upon a Time” (1944) urges us to see it, using words like “wonderful”, “whimsical”, the questionably grammatical “chucklesome”, and “Santa Claus.”

Talking heads of Cary Grant and Janet Blair in argumentative pose don’t help much to convey what the movie is about and exactly why we should see it. We probably can’t blame the studio publicity department, though, as the plot for this “whimsical” and “chucklesome” film has to do with Grant playing a huckster who tries to make a starring attraction from a small boy’s pet caterpillar, who dances to “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby.”

Standby character actors James Gleason and William Demarest report duty. The boy is Ted Donaldson, whom you may remember as Peggy Ann Garner’s brother in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (1945). This was Ted’s first film. If you’ve seen it, let us know what you think.

Life Begins for Andy Hardy - 1941

“Life Begins for Andy Hardy” (1941) brings Andy into The Real World and closes the door, or attempts to close the door, on his childhood. “Today I am a man!” he yells from his massive convertible roadster as he pulls away from home and loved ones to seek his fortune in New York, but he’s still that bouncy teenager with no more notion of what it is to be an adult than he did when the series started.

Mickey Rooney, prodigiously talented but typecast by this time, had played the character of Andy Hardy in something like 17 or 18 movies and short subjects, so he had Andy down cold. Andy could demonstrate winning charm, hearty all-American boy determination, or comically sad remorse, but he never really developed as a character. He was no Harry Potter.


Judy Garland plays his pal “Betsy Booth” in this one, and demonstrates her spectacular comedic timing and way with a line, particularly as the overly dramatic teenaged girl, “I’m simply curdled with remorse,” or boasting “My mother just bought me an evening gown with no visible means of support!” or “I drove around that revolting block 51 times and my feet are killing me!”


Andy’s ma and pa, played by the ever reliable Fay Holden and Lewis Stone nervously allow their boy to take off for the summer after high school graduation to try his luck getting a job in New York. Lewis Stone, whose wry humor and subtle facial expressions alone make him one of the most endearing screen fathers, wants Andy to settle down and go to college in the fall. Ann Rutherford has only a brief appearance in her regular role as Polly Benedict in the series. It’s mostly Andy in the big city, with occasional popping in and out by Judy Garland, whom Andy never seems to fall for, but treats as a bothersome child.

I suppose we could wince at Andy’s being a member of the graduating class of 1941, knowing that in six months the nation would be at war and Andy’s future, like the future of most of his generation, was going to be in serious jeopardy. But this is the back lot, a spanking clean small town, a tidy and village-like New York City, and a convertible so clean and shiny you could apply your makeup in its reflection. There’s no foreboding because never going to be anything really wrong.


If this were a Harold Lloyd outing, we would suffer over the risks Harold was taking by traveling to the big city, taking a room in a small residential hotel, messing up at his office boy’s job. Harold would be beaten up by a romantic rival, stuffed down a dumbwaiter and probably run over by a streetcar six or seven times. That’s why we loved him. There’s just something about a guy who gets run over six or seven times but keeps bouncing back. But Andy is so self assured, and his tie is so perfect, we never really have to worry about him. He doesn’t need us. He’s got mom and pop, Auntie, and Judy looking after him. When Andy does mess up at work, his boss forgives him and gives him free tickets to a dinner dance. What a swell guy.

However, this film is a bit of a departure from others in the series in that Andy deals with the sudden death of a new friend, and very nearly being seduced by a big city vamp. But he is neither led astray nor discouraged for very long. Even though he learns what it means to go hungry, we know, and he knows, that he can always go home to that middle class home where his mother makes his favorite breakfast and helps him put his pants on, where his spinster aunt will slip him money, and where his dad will send him to college.

Mickey Rooney, as always, makes it work by appearing so genuinely likeable, even when Andy is at his most self-involved.

Fun signs-of-the-times to watch for is that his rent is $5 a week, and when he finally gets his office boy job (which is very cushy and gives him very little to do), he is paid $10 a week. Not bad. When he and Jimmy, his new pal whom Andy gives a helping hand, are low on funds, they can at least be glad that the 25 cents they have between them will feed them for three days. They are being only a little sarcastic.

Patricia Dane is the streetwise and sassy as the big city vamp, who at first dismisses Andy, then helpfully gets him a job, then tries to seduce him. After leaving her with propriety at her apartment door all movie long, he finally gets into her apartment at the end of the film. Luckily for Andy’s poor mother, the vamp’s ex-husband barges in and destroys the mood.

When the expensive fur she wears turns out not to be the gift from one of her conquests, but instead is a gift to herself she charged to her ex-husband, it feels a little like a copout, as if they are trying to make her character shifty but not necessarily promiscuous. As it is, the Catholic Legion of Decency came down on this film (On an Andy Hardy film? No!) because of the very idea of Andy being almost seduced and his father having a man-to-man talk with him in the most vague and couched language about staying away from big city vamps.

Some of the film does sound like one of those educational “Don’t Let This Happen to You” one-reelers of days gone by, but Mickey Rooney and staff, likeable as they are all are, make Andy’s summertime New York adventure one swell experience. He needs to kick back and relax; high school was tough, and Pearl Harbor is only six months away.

At the Beach

As summer dwindles, let us go to the beach. We had discussed some beach scenes in this post from 2007, and some readers responded with favorite beach scenes. I hope you can come up with some more. Above we have Dorothy McGuire and Guy Madison in “Till the End of Time” (1946), a movie which deserves its own discussion some time or other, but for now, the beach scene will be enough. I think it rivals the famous Deborah Kerr-Burt Lancaster “From Here to Eternity” (1953) scene both in terms passion and pushing the censors’ buttons.



Now, here is a look at some fully-clothed, family style fun in “The Crowd” (1928) with Eleanor Boardman. Few people actually enter the water in this interesting beach scene; it’s really more like a town picnic with an ocean as a backdrop.



Back to McGuire and Madison. One of the things I love about this scene is the continuous movement. They are constantly rolling over each other, touching, and managing a continuous stream of dialogue as they change position in a natural-looking exploration of each other. Perhaps because the dialogue never stops and they never linger in one grasp for long is the only reason I can think of the censors allowed some of this.


Ah, humanity in all its half-dressed glory. Here is a crowd shot (had to have been a real crowd on a real beach), in “The Devil and Miss Jones” (1941), one of many films to be shot with New York’s Coney Island as a setting.










O-kay, we seem to be intruding now. Let’s just walk away quietly and try not to kick any sand. We’ll come back in a minute, and when we do, we’ll clear our throats very loudly so they’ll know we’re here.


Back to “The Devil and Miss Jones” and the sand-covered beach blanket of Spring Byington, Charles Coburn, Jean Arthur, and Bob Cummings. And more extras than you can shake a stick at. One of my favorite beach scenes for its claustrophobic camaraderie.


Jeez-Louise, they’re still at it. AHEM! AHEM! Hello! H-e-l-l-O-O-O-O! Forget it. Let’s go back to Coney Island.


Ah, so telling a gesture, Charles Coburn sifting sand through his fingers, like the sands of time quickly leaving his grasp as he ponders his own lonely life against the passionate young love of Miss Arthur and Mr. Cummings. And he looks great in his saggy woolen rented bathing suit. By the way, have a look here at a fun post on women’s beach fashions over at Allure.



Oh, now see, this is nice. She’s brushing her lips on his arm. Very nice. Am I staring? I’m sorry. Anyone want anything from the snack bar? Some fried clams, maybe? Lobster roll?



Bogie at the beach, with Gloria Grahame in “In a Lonely Place” (1950). More moonlit beach snuggling, but something’s going to set him off any minute in a rage. No baggy rented suit, no snorkel. No boogie board. Or Bogie board. Bogart doesn’t seem to be much fun at the beach. He doesn't even take his clothes off.



Oh, she’s finally stopping to play a record. Aren’t wind-up Victrola’s wonderful? You can take them anywhere, and with a little cranking, you can listen to “Yes, We Have No Bananas” all day long.


Right, now we’re down to the pillow talk pose. Won’t last long, though, this beach encounter, like Bogie’s, ends with an argument, too. Nothing lasts for ever, not snuggling on the beach, not the song on your 78rpm record, and not summer. The older you get, the shorter summer gets.

Make the most of the rest of your summer. In the meantime, have a look here at the beach scene in “From Here to Eternity.”

More Sexy Typists

Because there is nothing more sexy than a typewriter, and nothing more exciting than watching someone type, here we have a sequel to our post last November on “A Guy, A Girl, and a Typewriter”, but this time focusing in on the gentlemen.

Above we have Troy Donahue (“if Troy Donahue can learn to type, then I can learn to type…” I believe was how the lyric in “A Chorus Line” went) as the handsome young writer/stablehand in “Susan Slade” (1961). As we can see by the movies, typing is clearly an expression of virility.


Here we have David Niven and Doris Day in “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” (1960), while the suave and dashing Niven pauses in his typing, allowing Miss Day to openly adore him for a moment or two before he goes back to work.



William Holden in “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing” (1955). Was there ever a more virile typist? I think not.


Even the normally aloof tough guy Humphrey Bogart, seen here in “A Lonely Place” (1950), evolves into a raging sex symbol just by taping out a few lines and slapping the carriage return, as he has slapped the mugs of so many gangsters.



Harold Lloyd, whose hapless bespectacled everyman might not be considered the most macho fellow around, but put him behind a typewriter, and he’s as sexy as William Holden. No, really. Love this old typewriter in “Girl Shy” (1924).


And just because we’ve noted before that Barbara Stanwyck is the silver screen’s most prolific typist, here she captivates Warren William in “The Secret Bride” (1934), proving once again that she can hold her own with the boys.

Roy's Boots, Trigger's Horseshoes

Having mentioned Grauman’s Chinese Theater last week, perhaps it be-hooves us to note one of its many famous cement autographs, Roy Rogers and Trigger. Not only do we get Roy’s boot prints, but Trigger’s horseshoe prints, and the imprint of Roy’s six-shooter. Also, most other signers in cement at this auspicious sidewalk autograph book have not been so fastidious as to leave us the actual date. The King of the Cowboys was one thorough hombre.

Bette Davis, Dick Cavett, and Character Actors

During her appearance on the “Dick Cavett Show” November 18, 1971, Bette Davis reflected on the great loss to the world of theatre and film with the death only the previous evening of Gladys Cooper. The remarkable Gladys Cooper had played Davis’ mother in “Now, Voyager” (1944).

Perhaps some of you saw the rerun of this, one of Cavett’s iconic interviews, over the weekend on TCM. Miss Davis also mourned as a great loss to films Walter Huston, who had died some twenty years previously. She made the observation, as so many of old movie buffs have since, that the character actors were a mainstay of the industry, and that with their loss films would never be the same. She got that right.

It’s interesting that she made this remark nearly 40 years ago, when the studio system was still a fresh memory if no longer an influence in the 1970s film industry, and when the greats of the golden age were retiring, grasping at TV show guest spots and regional dinner theatre, or dying in stages. These days film blogs note with alarming frequency the deaths of celebrities of decades past, but when Bette Davis perched herself on the set of Dick Cavett’s talk show with her cigarettes, the era between then and now was only just being delineated. Most of them weren’t dead yet, but they sure weren’t fighting off film offers. Yet in the 1930s and 1940s, elderly actors were seen in many films. They were character actors. They had spent a lifetime moving from the role of Juliet to the role of Juliet’s nurse, and the earned every penny and end credit, if the accolades were few.

Miss Davis also made the intriguing remark that Huston’s death was a big loss in part because filmmakers would no longer create parts for someone like Huston because Huston was gone. There would be no more (paraphrasing here) “write me a Walter Huston type, or get me a Walter Huston type”, because future generations who have no idea who Walter Huston was, or what his type was supposed to be, or why it might be a great addition to a film.

Is the dearth of character parts and favorite character actors in this movie era of blockbuster stardom, where the only character parts seem to be voiceover roles in animated features, a reflection of the death of Walter Huston, and Reginald Gardiner, and Mary Wickes (who acted right up until the end of her life, bless her and bless the people who hired her)?

Which came first, the character actor, or the character actor roles? Which died first? What are your thoughts?

Grauman's Chinese Theater

One of the most iconic movie theaters in the United States, let alone Los Angeles, is Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, later Mann’s, on Hollywood Boulevard, which opened in the 1927. Though evocative of Asian motifs, it’s exotic architecture perhaps demonstrates even more about an ebullient, if not zany, 1927 USA than it does China.

It is equally known for the garden of footprints (and handprints, and hoof prints) in cement that form one of the most popular tourist attractions for visitors to Hollywood, as well as the many studio film premieres held here.

For more on the Chinese Theatre and description of its opulent décor, have a look here.

ANNOUNCEMENT: I’d like to open up these occasional posts on individual theaters to everyone who’d like to submit a photo and their own memories and/or research on a particular theater. I’ve realized that there’s a whole lot of movie houses out there in the heartland that you can cover better than I can. The movie theater need not be in business today, and photos are not absolutely necessary, but if you happen to be driving along and some Art Deco marquee catches your eye, grab your camera. Send your info to: JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com. Thanks.

I SHOULD ALSO NOTE: The photos must be yours, or in the public domain, with the understanding that any photo or email communication you send may be published on this blog.

Polio as a Subject for the Movies

Above is some March of Dimes newsreel footage about the treatment of polio. In the early 1950s, the “fight” for a way to prevent polio became a “race” as the panic over yearly summertime polio epidemics grew more widespread and more fierce. In 1955, the vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk became available to the public, and thousands upon thousands of people brought their children to be vaccinated. That this was a new and largely untried serum, the public’s leap of faith had to be enormous. Perhaps the only thing greater than their faith was their fear of this horrific illness.

Knowing all that, it seems strange that there were not more movies with polio patients or polio treatment as a subject. When one considers other dreaded elements of the stressful post-war life that became fodder for many films, elements such as the fear of nuclear warfare, the fear of communism, the lurid explorations of crime, mental illness, and flying saucers, why was there not more examination in the movies of the greatest medical story of the day? A story that was so inherently dramatic?

Perhaps because polio was even scarier to most people than nuclear war, foreign enemies, bad guys, or aliens from another planet. Some of those films were fantasies or at least dealt with threats to modern society that were not as plausible or as fearsome as going to a public pool one day, developing a fever that night, and ending up in an iron lung in a matter of days.

There was “Sister Kenny” (1944) with Rosalind Russell which touched upon polio through the biography of the Australian nurse who developed her own methods of therapy for polio victims. We’ve also noted in the recently covered “Roughly Speaking” (1945), also with Rosalind Russell, that one of the children in the film had been a polio victim, and wore leg braces as a child, improving to using a cane as an adult. But she was only one member of a large family, and her story was not the central one.

Perhaps the most striking drama I can recall involving polio as a plot element, was an episode in the old “Loretta Young Show” on television, called “Earthquake”, originally aired in October of 1953. In this episode, Loretta plays the wife of a man who must stay in an iron lung at home because his polio has left him unable to breathe on his own. Set in a southern California town, when an earthquake occurs in the middle of the night and the electricity goes off, Loretta must manipulate the hand crank on the iron lung to keep the bellows working, to keep her husband breathing. When the crank breaks, she opens the machine, and manually pumps and massages her paralyzed husband’s chest for hours until help arrives. It is a grim story, and the triumphant message at the conclusion relates to their love for each other, and their perseverance in never giving up until he may someday recover.

Many people did recover from polio to varying degrees, but many did not. Though polio has been eradicated in most countries today, thanks to Dr. Salk and to Dr. Albert Sabine, there is still no cure. Here is a link to a news story from 2008 about a woman in an iron lung who, like the character in the melodramatic “Loretta Young Show”, faced calamity when her home lost power. She died. Her polio left her unable to live outside the iron lung. She had been living in an iron lung for 50 years, since childhood.

Possibly the most famous polio victim was of course President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who at various times tried to hide his physical limitations, leading to a bit of controversy when his memorial statue in Washington, D.C. did not openly depict him in his wheelchair. Elements in the design were later changed to suggest his wheelchair beneath his cloak.

Actress Helen Hayes lost her 19-year-old daughter, Mary, to polio, and thereafter dedicated herself to the cause. Here is a link to an article, and a 1951 audio piece of Miss Hayes speaking on the Mary MacArthur Respirator Unit at Children’s Hospital in Boston, where she calls polio “that most frightening of diseases that strike children.”

The public, obviously, was very aware of the urgency to fight polio, but was there still some controversial element of showing polio victims for there to be so few feature films? Or was the illness, and its treatment, perceived by the public as too ghastly to be the subject of a movie drama, far more scary than the worse movie monster imaginable?

PBS showed an excellent documentary a few months ago on the “race” to develop the polio vaccine. A striking indirect message is that younger generations are likely ignorant of the magnitude of the fear of polio in society. That is both a good thing and a bad thing. Their ignorance of polio demonstrates they do not have to fear it. But if they want to know about this awful aspect of life in the early 1950s (and previously), they won’t learn much from the movies.

Do you recall any other movies that mentioned or in some way dealt with the subject of polio? Do you remember getting the shot, or the oral vaccine? Do you remember being afraid?

Below, Ella Fitzgerald delivers a public service announcement, as many stars did, for the March of Dimes in 1958.