Friendo: “Last night I was watching Joshua Logan‘s Picnic, a film I’ve always liked, despite it being dated and the fact William Holden is too old (37) for the role he’s playing, a 20something drifter named Hal Carter.
“But William Inge‘s play won the Pulitzer, and I can see why. It’s about sexual repression, small-town isolation, stunted dreams, etc. Themes that are just as relevant today as they were over 60 years ago.
“Which made me think that with the proper handling, Picnic could be made today, and really work. Don’t be so coy about the sex. Cast it better. But stick with the insider look at MAGA-land.
“So here’s my thought: what films that seem dated, but have interesting, still relevant subtext, could be remade today?”
Here’s the problem with remaking Picnic, which was crafted not only by Logan and Inge but screenwriter Daniel Taradash and cinematographer James Wong Howe. The problem is that despite the blandly bucolic and dysfunctional culture of mid ’50s Kansas that Inge came from and wrote about, that realm no longer exists. The outwardly tidy appearance and generally conservative mindset that seemed to prevail in the mid 20th Century heartland has…okay, I haven’t been to rural Kansas since the early ’70s so what do I know? But I can imagine. That region has certainly given way to something less open to the exotic, and probably coarser and trashier.
I don’t want to think about the red-state resentments and recalcitrance that have taken root in that part of the country over the last 60 or 70 years…God, in some ways (though welcomely not all ways) this has become such an ugly country.
So I don’t know about bringing Picnic into the 21st Century, and I don’t know about A Face in the Crowd either. I don’t know if anything written in that far-off, all-but-disappeared culture of Eisenhower America…I don’t think any of it fits into today’s realm.