Picnic

An enormously tedious and overblown adaptation of William Inge's successful play about a drifter (Holden) who arrives in a Kansas town, a brawny sexual presence who changes some of the people's lives. It is typical of the kind of histrionic, slightly daring, small-town stories which always got rave reviews in the '50s on account of their 'dramatic authenticity'. There are admittedly some reasonable performances (Holden, Robertson and Strasberg, in particular), but Kim Novak in a crucial central role is completely flat.