Picnic (1955)

A stranger comes to town and causes great upheaval. The stranger's arrival sets old conflicts in motion; old wounds are re-opened and repressed tensions come to the surface. This can be said to be a genre of its own in Hollywood movies, regardless of whether the stranger is a cowboy, a criminal or a don juan. Joshua Logan's Picnic is a comedy/romance/drama rolled into one, an unabashedly melodramatic tale about small-town neuroses. The elusive stranger is a drifter called Hal who jumps off the fright train in a town somewhere in Kansas to look for his old college chum. He's there to visit an old pal but one thing leads to another and Hal ends up in the storm's eye, at the center of social conflict and dramas involving business and romance. Hal is the cheerful guy who wants to be liked by everybody. The climax of the film is a picnic featuring rowdy drunks, dancing and fierce jealousy. Picnic could almost have been directed by Nicholas Ray - the same focus on social upheaval. Another point of reference is Arthur Penn's outrageous (but rather funny) The Chase from 1966. Completely over-the-top, but I must confess I enjoyed this rather clunky story (along with the wooden and/or overwrought acting) about the drifter and the beatiful girl and her mother. - - Good trash.