With Daniel Taradash’s screenplay, Logan’s Picnic departs radically from the drama, which does not have a picnic. Inge’s play skips the Picnic as Hal Carter and Madge Owens move to make love, and the curtain falls.
Logan directed the Broadway production of Inge’s Picnic but knew that the film must have a picnic, and he devotes about half of the film to a “real” Kansas Labor Day spectacle of which Madge is the picnic queen. Seated in a swanboat and wearing a crown and red cape, Madge is saluted by hundreds of picnickers chanting, “Neewollah,” a pun on Halloween spelled backward. *
Joshua Logan. Picnic (1956). Picnic queen
As the swanboat passes, Hal is smitten, which Madge notices approvingly. Her queenly duties finished, Madge makes her move and invites Hal to dance. Her intentions are unmistakable., and the dance is magical, tense, fierce, and steamy. As in the play, and according to the Hollywood code of censorship, their eventual lovemaking is off-screen.
* “Neewollah” is specific to Independence, Kansas, Inge’s hometown. Inexplicably, Logan and Taradash moved Halloween to Labor Day.
See Joshua Logan. Picnic (1956). The screenplay by Daniel Taradash is based on William Inge’s Picnic William Inge. Picnic; a Summer Romance in Three Acts. New York: Random House, 1953; Summer Brave: The Rewritten and Final Version of the Romantic Comedy Picnic. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1983; Joshua Logan. Joshua: My Up and Down, In and Out Life. New York: Delacorte Press, 1976; Ralph F. Voss, A Life of William Inge. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1989; Joanna E. Rapf. “The Fear of Loving: Daniel Taradash on his Adaptation of Picnic.” Literature/Film Quarterly 19.1 (January 1991)
The cast: Kin Novak as madge Owens; William Holden as Hal Carter