Monday, June 08, 2009

Picnic & Splendor


The selection of DVDs on an given day at a branch of the Toronto Public Library is quirky to say the least--it's how I came to discover Sister Wendy. It was because of this random availability I came to watch Picnic (1955 with William Holden and Kim Novak, directed by Joshua Logan, who critic Roger Ebert describes as "among the worst filmmakers of his time") and Splendor in the Grass (1961 with Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood, directed by Elia Kazan) in quick succession.

They're both about the traps that sex set for women. Picnic is simplistic and overwrought: a hunky Holden shows up in town one Labour Day weekend, awakening sleeping desires among the women of a small Kansas town. Sparks fly between Holden's Hal Carter and Novak's Madge. She's a 19-year-old beauty queen courting the town's rich boy; he's an older drifter (Holden was 37 when the film was made and I imagine his character was meant to be mid to late 20s). Madge's younger sister is a brain. Her family's lodger is a prim but loopy old-maid school teacher, played with over-the-top vim by Rosalind Russell. Each of them falls for Holden, whose shirt is off or ripped for much of the movie. He's all sex, all the time, which seems so much more appealing than the chore of finding a husband and looking good in the eyes of the community, but the likes of Hal Carter can offer no permanent solution, just an exciting weekend that, hopefully, won't ruin the rest of your life.

Splendor is overwrought too, but stranger and more willing to try to break open the rules of the game. The good rich boy and the sexualized hunk are the same person--Warren Beatty playing Bud Stamper in his first starring role. He's dating Deanie, played by Wood, who is a good girl but who recognizes her beau's urges--the opening scene is a front-seat sex negotiation. No, you don't have to import an older out-of-towner to introduce sexual danger to a small town. Her choice is not between sex and security but whether to risk using sex to obtain security. It doesn't go well for her. She cracks up and ends up in a mental institution. She didn't have the skills to negotiation between good girl and whore. Though both films are melodramas, Splendor internalizes its perversity, making the heroine partly responsible for the trap that she lets society put her in.

Besides their lessons in sexual deportment, the other contrast that's interesting between the two films is the female leads. Novak is a cold beauty with all the charisma of a dish rag. There are moments in Picnic where she looks like a feather-haired 80s singer trapped in a rock video by a director who's bullied her into submission. But Wood! I hadn't paid attention to her before. In Splendor she's raw and alive and so contemporary, you want to reach out and comfort her when she's suffering. You can imagine if she had been teleported to Hollywood in 2009, she'd be taking up so much space, the likes of Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman would be relegated to the B-List.

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