ZedBlog

The movie, now restored in a handsome new wide-screen print, takes place on a long Labor Day and the night and morning which follow. It begins as Hal Carter (Holden) hops off a freight train and goes looking for his old college roommate Alan (Cliff Robertson). Hal was a football hero, but now he's a bum and needs a job. Alan takes him up atop one of his family's grain elevators, and Hal explains what he has in mind: “A nice little office where I can have a sweet little secretary and talk over the telephone about enterprises and things.” He's promised the job. Meanwhile, he's fallen into the orbit of the Owens family, who run a boarding house. There's mom (Betty Field), the beautiful Madge and her kid sister Millie (Susan Strasberg), who sneaks puffs on cigarettes and is college- bound and has read the same page of her Flannery O'Connor novel so often, it's creased and dog-eared (if we notice things like that, why can't the prop department?).

Mrs. Owens is pushing her daughter's romance with Alan, the rich kid from the right side of town. But then Madge lays eyes on Hal, who first appears to the Owens women while burning trash for kindly ole Mrs. Potts next door. Holden, who spends much of the film stripped to the waist and much of the rest with his shirt torn, stands behind the trash can so that the flames wrinkle the air in front of him, and looks like a Chippendale boy on yard duty.

The film's center section occurs at the Labor Day picnic, where the Halloween queen begins her reign. Director Joshua Logan, among the worst filmmakers of his time, spends so much footage on the picnic, you'd think this was a documentary: There are crying babies, laughing babies, frowning babies, three-legged races, pie-eating competitions, balloon drops, concerts and boy-girl contests.

The Owens gather with several friends, including Rosalind Russell as an old-maid schoolteacher, Arthur O'Connell as her cigar- chomping beau, and Alan, who watches uneasily as sparks fly between Hal and Madge. This scene, like several others involving a lot of characters, is awkwardly composed. All of the actors are lined up from one edge of the Vista.Vision screen to the other, seemingly not noticing that they're all facing in the same direction (ours).

As night falls, Madge and Hal begin to dance together sensually, in the movie's famous sexy scene. Madge, dizzy with passion, tells him, and I quote, “You remind me of one of those statues--one of those old Roman gladiators. All he had on was a shield.” Meanwhile, the Rosalind Russell character gets drunk and hysterically demands that her old coot marry her.

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