Picnic: Nostalgia in Hollywood by Michael Moriarty
Here is a full assortment of PICNIC possibilities.
Bits and pieces.
Or, if you can figure out the complexities of You Tube’s membership privileges, you can view the whole, entire, flawless and profoundly American masterpiece by the divinely merciless writer, William Inge.
Picnic has lived in my heart and soul since my 18th year of life, in the summer of 1959, and my appearance as the play’s newsboy, Bomber, the horny teenager with an obsessive “hard-on” for Madge.
Looking back now, at the age of 75, 57 long and very eventful years ago, the haunting magic of Picnic’s flawless movie version with William Holden and Kim Novak?
I tear up just thinking about it.
Why?
For one, I so miss the America I knew in the 1950’s!
Compared to this present nightmare of The Obama Nation?!
Two, as I grow older and older, I am an increasingly and terminally incurable but lust-filled romantic.
For three, the depth of Picnic’s vision and understanding of the America I grew up in?!
Almost unsurpassable!
Fourth and finally, the simple power of great literature… and Picnic is a small but densely packed gem… it contains most of the major corners within the very 1950’s United States that formed me!! The nation that created the very essence of who and what I remain to be in this very moment!!!
Right now, since I don’t know yet how to sign up for the whole movie’s You Tube showing, I’m watching a clip of William Holden’s Hal, his unending expressions of being “knocked-out” by The Queen of Neewollah, Kim Novak’s Madge!
I’m now being taken through the film in bits and pieces, clips from a perfect selection of high points… although I find the whole experience of Picnic a “high point”!
One of the highest high points is always the dance scene.
The slow and deliciously agonizing eruptions of pure lust between our leading characters?!
Wrap the black magic of Halloween around the erectile ballet going on within this classically Dionysian feast… the soul of middle class America, its frigidly bourgeois shock at sexual passion’s shameless horns, its true, male and female lusts.
Morris Stoloff, the musical director, has been handed this golden opportunity to orchestrate one of the most distinctively musical moments in dramatic film history.
Not since Casablanca and Herman Hupfeld’s “As Time Goes By“, has Hollywood wrapped all of humanity up into the beginnings of two of the screen’s most unforgettable love affairs.
Previous to the premieres of both Picnic and Casablanca, both As Time Goes By and Moonglow had been indelibly unforgettable hits.
George Dunning’s Picnic melody, and its erotic mysteries floating above the sweet and relatively harmless rhythms of Moonglow?!
TO READ FULL COLUMN BY ACTOR MICHAEL MORIARTY CLICK HERE…
