There's the beef

Picnic is one for the ladies

There are many pleasures to Picnic, the 1955 Hollywood film reissued by Columbia Classics and opening this Friday at the Coolidge Corner. For starters, we're talking an all-star studio cast headed by William Holden (name above the title in those post-Sabrina days), a pre-Vertigo Kim Novak, and Rosalind Russell. And then we've been given a newly restored Technicolor print, which makes those slice-of-life scenes of Americana at a small-town Kansas fair, the extended middle of the film, so winningly picturesque. (The legendary James Wong Howe is the cinematographer.) Picnic is in Cinemascope, too; that's utilized best in the scene where Novak and Holden, each swaying solo to a heated rhythm, come together from opposite sides of the wide screen for a slow dance -- to the dreamy Picnic theme song -- which is star-sytem orgasmic.

Picnic is, of course, the Hollywood movie that brashly replaces cinema's dominant male gaze (men eyeing woman) with female voyeurism everywhere. Young Milly (Millie Perkins) trying to peek through a hole in the wall to watch the men changing out of their bathing suits is only one example of the rampant Peeping Thomasina-ism.

This all happens because Holden's drifter, studly Hal Carter, arrives in town looking for work. In the past, Carter's been an artist model ("They had me posing in front of a class, almost raw"), so he knows how to strut his stuff. Picnic turns into a brazen 1950s equivalent of a Bruce Weber shoot for Interview, as Holden strips off his shirt and parades about, showing off his bare, handsome chest. He's naked above the waist for half the movie, his torso totally eroticized, and the Picnic ladies, from 17 to 70, get their appetitites whetted ogling him.

Still, Picnic isn't among the really great movies of the 1950s. Joshua Logan's direction is rather pedestrian, and there's too much self-pity from all the characters. Playwright William Inge, on whose play the Daniel Taradash script is based, tried, it seems, to write a Kansas-set Chekhov drama, something vaguely Uncle Vanya-ish, in which each character thirsts for something he or she is not, or yearns for love from someone who can't possibly love back. But lacking Chekhov's self-depreciating wit, the Picnic ensemble come off as whiners.

Yet here's another reason to catch the film: it's a daring attack on the frigid 1950s, with a sexually absorbed script scratching at the heavily enforced Hollywood Code. This was a very hot film in 1955 -- just consider Holden's bragging hitchhiking tale to a male buddy: "Two babes pulled up in a yellow convertible. One says, `Hey beefcake, get in,' so I got in. They had a shaker of martinis. . . . They must have thought I was Superman."

On the other hand, what to make of Roz Russell's "old-maid schoolteacher" (that's how she introduces herself), who, after precipitating an ugly, ugly scene trying to seduce Holden, literally gets down on her knees begging her old-time unsexy beau to marry her? Is that where Picnic's values ultimately lie? With the "wise" old unmarried lady who speaks up for keeping Holden around (even if he's a jobless womanizer): "There was a man in the house, and it felt good."

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WOULDN'T YOU HAVE changed your summer plans if you'd known? There was a Godzilla convention at a Radisson outside Chicago in late August. Fans from around the globe swapped homemade miniatures of the thunder-lizard monster and asked questions of two Japanese actors, Haruo Nakajima and Kenpachiro Satsuma, who played him from within rubber suits.

A reporter from the Chicago Reader attended the Nakajima-Satsuma Q&A: "A thin young man in black jeans approached the microphone: `Given the situation that Godzilla found himself in in Destroyah, did that lead you to change your approach toward portraying the character in any way?' The query was met with a long pause, and then an interminable response in Japanese. The crowd leaned forward, transfixed."

Godzilla guys, get a life?

Rather than scoff, this Godzilla novice learned that the original 1954 Japanese flick was called Gojira. It came to America in 1956, with splice-ins of Raymond Burr, as Godzilla, King of the Monsters. And big boy Burr was spliced in again for the stinker among Godzilla pictures, Godzilla 1985.

Many of the later Godzilla spawnings are shot in Tohoscope.

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A VARIETY STORY by Todd McCarthy and Brendan Kelly following up this year's Toronto International Film Festival insinuated that the fest was a semi-flop because American distributors didn't discover films the way they had in the past -- pictures like Diva, Europa Europa, Priest, and Welcome to the Dollhouse. The charge is nonsense: the festival remains a great one, and many terrific films turned up in 1996. It was the distributors who didn't have the guts to take a chance on purchasing them.

I can understand why the four beautiful Iranian films that played at Toronto might have trouble locating an audience in America. But what of Serge Bodrov's finely crafted Prisoner of the Mountains, a pacifist film about Russian soldiers captured by the "enemy" in Chechnya? Or Irma Vip, Olivier Assayad's inside look at French filmmaking starring Hong Kong's charismatic star, Maggie Chen? Truffaut's Day for Night for the 1990s?

No, the Toronto Fest stands tall, even if Miramax claims it couldn't find there its next The Postman.

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