Plains Folk: Picnic put Kansas on the map
By TOM ISERN
© Plains Folk
Fifty years ago Hollywood came to Kansas like it never has before or since. I mean heart-throb Hollywood, William Holden taking his shirt off and all that. "Picnic," director Joshua Logan's adaptation of William Inge's play, was filmed in central Kansas in 1955.
When you watch the film today, it seems sort of hokey. Both the musical score and the acting are overdone. The symbolism is clunky, too. Getting past that, you have a compelling collection of characters, including Holden as Hal Carter, the drifter oozing sex appeal; Kim Novak as Madge Owens, the home-town beauty; Cliff Robertson as Madge's loser of a boyfriend; and Rosalind Russell in her comeback role as a desperate schoolteacher. The plot line, although predictable in general, has some interesting twists.
For Kansans there is the particular interest of identifying local shooting sites. Salina, Sterling, Nickerson, Hutchinson, and Halstead all appear in the film. Sterling Lake was the locale for Holden's swimming scene (another excuse to take off his shirt). If you think muddy old Sterling Lake is not the stuff of romance, well, my parents would tell you different. (Inside joke.)
It was nice that Columbia filmed in Kansas, but does "Picnic" have any other particular pertinence to the state? It does in a couple of ways.
First, the playwright, William Inge, was a Kansas boy with a tragic story. He grew up in Independence, which has an Inge festival every year. Inge once said, "People who grow up in small towns get to know each other so much more closely than they do in cities." "Picnic" won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1952. Despite this and other honors, Inge never quite lived up to what many thought was his promise. His personal life was unhappy as well; he died a suicide in 1973.
If you remember the end of the film, Madge goes off to be with Hal, and presumably live poor but happy in love. Inge hated the ending that director Logan put on the film. In Inge's version, Madge stays behind and presumably lives a safe, boring life. Inge didn't have much hope for true love.
The other strong Kansas connection forged by the film was the local buy-in provided by Kansans. They enjoyed Russell's story-telling, and they delighted in Holden's macho antics (such as hanging out the window of Hutchinson's Baker Hotel), but more than that, they wanted to be involved in the production. More people wanted jobs as extras for the crowd scenes than the production company could afford to pay. People just showed up anyway, and the director went with that, effectively making the crowds part of the festival scenes.
I remember a few years ago driving around Hutchinson with Bill Shaffer of KTWU, Topeka, doing some filming for public television. As we passed the Fox Theatre, Bill began telling tales of the sensation over "Picnic." It turns out his father was a theatre manager and was involved with arrangements for the filming. Now Bill has written up some of this historical background for Kansas Heritage, the Kansas State Historical Society's magazine for young people. The article, "The Summer of Picnic," gives specifics about filming locales and incidents and, more than that, captures the public enthusiasm for the production.
I think we can be reasonably content with how Hollywood serves us up to the public in this case. The people in "Picnic" are flawed, real people we can care about. Its production cast learned about tornadoes (this was the summer of the Udall disaster) and put grain elevators into the movie. This is one of Hollywood's better encounters with the plains.
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and clarifications
Clarification: Transportation to Newton Medical Center for visits with Dr. Stephen Cranston is available through Marion County Department for Elderly. There is a fee.
