May 12 and May 19 | 6 films
In the movies and real life, we venture away from our hometowns, but ultimately, they shape who we are — and sometimes they pull us back.
Picnic (1955)
A drifter shakes up a small Kansas town when he arrives on a train on Labor Day in Picnic (1955). Hal Carter (William Holden) is looking for work, not realizing it’s Labor Day. Hal doesn't fit in with the polite townspeople, as he wears boots, a worn leather jacket and a dirty shirt. However, while everyone is seemingly content to celebrate the holiday with a picnic and crowning a beauty queen, some seem to want more.
It’s the last day of summer vacation for schoolteacher Rosemary Sydney (Rosalind Russell), but she doesn’t like teaching, is tired of hanging out with other unmarried teachers and wants to find love. Beautiful 19-year-old Madge Owens (Kim Novak) is tired of being viewed as merely pretty — even her mother (Betty Field) reminds her that all she has is beauty, which fades, and she should find security in marriage soon. However, Madge isn’t particularly intelligent and feels uncomfortable spending time with the upper-class citizens in town, like fraternity boy Alan Benson (Cliff Robertson), who has courted her all summer. Madge’s younger sister, Millie Owens (Susan Strasberg), laments that “Madge is the pretty one,” but Millie is the intellectual sister who reads college-level books and memorizes Shakespeare's sonnets, dreaming of leaving the small town. Only the wealthy seem content to leave things as they are, like Alan, who is unhappy when Hal the drifter, disrupts the norm.
The combination of the on-location shoot in Hutchinson, KS, with locals, Joshua Logan’s direction and James Wong Howe’s cinematography offer the perfect illusion of a sweltering, late-summer day in a small town.
While William Holden nearly turned down the film role, believing he was too old at age 37, he embodies the brash, fast-talking character.
Director Joshua Logan felt Novak was also the key to the film’s success. In an interview, he said she was perfect for the role of Madge.
“I have a feeling that Kim is Madge,” Logan said, elaborating that both Kim and Madge had a younger, intellectual sister. “Kim was treated as Madge was treated — ‘Madge is the pretty one! Isn’t Madge beautiful’ until both began to wonder whether they existed beyond their beautiful faces.”
Similar to Madge being crowned queen of Neewollah (Halloween spelled backward), Novak also won beauty contests, including being crowned the Freshman Queen in college.
While Logan noted similarities, Novak said it was a challenging character and her first significant Hollywood role. In an interview after the film, she said that her sister Arlene was “the bright one in the family who got all the good grades.” However, Madge “was childlike … she had never been out of that little town … She had never seen men without their shirts. So there was a conflict within her when she felt sex for the first time ... Everything was the first time for her. It was very difficult to get the feeling of Madge. I wasn’t even recalling it. I lived in a small town in a way, since it was on the outskirts of Chicago, but still I wasn’t Madge.” However, Novak says that Madge has the guts to leave her small town in the end.
The Human Comedy (1943)
During World War II, even the smallest towns were touched by war, which is exhibited in Clarence Brown’s film based on a story by William Saroyan, The Human Comedy (1943).
Set in the small town of Ithaca, CA, the story follows the Macauley family. The father of the family (Ray Collins) died two years ago. Now that the eldest son Marcus (Van Johnson) was drafted to fight in World War II, the middle teenage son, Homer (Mickey Rooney), has to get a job after school to support his mother (Fay Bainter), sister Bess (Donna Reed) and little brother Ulysses, played by Jackie “Butch” Jenkins in his film debut. Homer works at the local telegraph office alongside an older, alcoholic telegraph operator, Willie Grogan (Frank Morgan).
Homer starts in the film young and carefree, but he changes — just like the world around him — and matures as Ithaca is affected by war. Homer has to take difficult messages to mothers who have lost their loved ones in war. His sister Bess and her friend Mary (Dorothy Morris) also experience war at home when they allow three furloughed soldiers (Robert Mitchum, Barry Nelson, Don DeFore) to join them at the movies and kiss them goodbye, knowing they will never see them again. Even five-year-old Ulysses learns about the world around him, like asking his mother what it means to be afraid.
“Saroyan set out to do a story about the war – not a battlefield story but a story on the war’s effect on a small town in America,” Mickey Rooney wrote in his autobiography. Rooney was drafted during the filming of The Human Comedy.
Rooney often played youthful, clowning characters, but under Clarence Brown’s direction, he gives a restrained and mature performance. In one scene where Rooney has to emotionally read a telegram and in each take, he would, “read it as though he’d seen it for the first time,” which impressed Brown, according to Brown’s biographer. Rooney received an Academy Award nomination for the film.
Actress Marsha Hunt, who plays the role of a wealthy girl in the film, said The Human Comedy was “what America needed to see and believe, in a time of universal stress and anxiety: that the family is strong and firm was what counted most and together could weather whatever came. Today’s revved-up, cynical America, with no memory of then, must find it pretty soap. But I love it.”
A Face in the Crowd (1957)
In A Face in the Crowd (1957), roving radio reporter Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) has a live program called “Face in the Crowd,” where she goes to different places for interviews in her rural Arkansas hometown. Marcia visits a small jail to interview the prisoners, where she meets Larry Rhodes (Andy Griffith), who was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct. Rhodes sings and plays the guitar on the radio, and Marcia nicknames him “Lonesome” Rhodes. Soon Lonesome Rhodes is given his own Arkansas radio show, where locals send him pies and letters.
Rhodes quickly realizes he can convince people to do anything after he speaks against a mayorial candidate and tells people to put dogs in the candidate’s yard. Rhodes’ fame grows, and he goes to Memphis for a television show, and onward and upward to New York City for a national TV show, and gets involved in politics. Marcia maintains her small-town sensibilities as she travels with Lonesome and supports his success. Rhodes maintains, “Shucks, I’m just a country boy,” while he is anything but. Rhodes becomes an egotistical monster who badmouths his supporters.
With portions filmed on location in Piggott, AR, Neal called her role a “honey of a part” in her autobiography. “I played a woman who discovers a hillbilly singer and turns him into a popular TV personality, only to find he’s become a monster,” she wrote.
To play the two southerners, director Elia Kazan cast two leads who were both from small southern towns: Andy Griffith was from Mount Airy, NC, and Neal was from Knoxville, TN. Initially, Jackie Gleason was considered for the role of Lonesome Rhodes, but Kazan determined the character needed to be a southerner, according to Kazan’s biographer. It was Griffith’s first film role.
Brother Orchid (1940)
Edward G. Robinson found fame by playing gangsters in crime dramas but occasionally was able to play a comedic mobster in films like Brother Orchid (1940). While Brother Orchid is a comedy, Robinson’s character learns you can’t always go home but may also find a new home in an unexpected place.
John Sarto (Edward G. Robinson) is the leader of a big city gang who decides to quit the business. He desires to go abroad and get some class to become a gentleman. For five years, Sarto travels across Europe, getting duped into thinking he’s buying priceless art and making bad investments. When he finally decides that home is where he belongs, Sarto finds everything changed. His gang is now led by another member (Humphrey Bogart), who isn’t willing to relinquish his power. His romantic partner (Ann Sothern) has risen from hat check girl to a wealthy nightclub owner. Sarto tries to adjust life to how it was before he left but finds he can’t take over his old territory.
When he’s injured after his former gang tries to kill him, Sarto finds himself outside of a Floracian monastery. As he convalesces, Sarto becomes a monk novice, because the monastery is an excellent hideout, taking the name Brother Orchid. While Sarto loves his time there, he has to return to his hometown in order to help the monks in his new home. The flower growing monks find they can’t sell their flowers in the market because of interference from Sarto’s old gang. In the end, while Sarto believes he longs for his old life, he finds his new life as Brother Orchid more fulfilling.
Cool Hand Luke (1967)
Sometimes home may not seem desirable at one point, but attitudes can change depending on conditions. In Cool Hand Luke (1967), decorated World War II veteran Luke Jackson (Paul Newman) is arrested for drunkenly cutting the tops off of parking meters. His sentence is hard labor with a southern chain gang at a prison camp.
When Luke enters the prison, he says he was defacing public property, because he was “settling a score in a small town without much to do.” Luke’s calm and “cool” demeanor soon makes him popular amongst the other prisoners, and he becomes friends with Dragline (George Kennedy). Strangely, the prison becomes “home” to Luke because of his camaraderie with the other prisoners. But after his mother (Jo Van Fleet) dies, Luke is restless. He’s put in a small isolation box to prevent his escape to attend the funeral, but even after his mother is buried, Luke tries to escape several times.
Luke can’t be caged, and his restlessness makes him a man without a home. Based on a semi-autobiographical book by Donn Pearce, a war hero and ex-convict, the name came from safecracker Donald Graham Garrison, according to Newman’s biographer.
To prepare for the southern-based role, Newman went to West Virginia to study small-town Appalachia, including how locals walked, spoke and held themselves. Newman talked to locals and recorded their accents, according to his biographer. Newman also learned how to play the banjo for the scene after Luke learns that his mother had died.
“It was one of the few roles I committed myself to on the basis of the original book without seeing the script,” Newman is quoted by his biographer. “It would have worked no matter how many mistakes were made.”
Hoosiers (1986)
In small towns, high school sports reign supreme. This is well-illustrated in Hoosiers (1986), when a small Indiana town places the same importance on the new high school basketball coach as they may on a new mayor.
Norman Dale (Gene Hackman) arrives in the small town to coach at Hickory High School. With a shady background, Dale hasn’t coached basketball in 12 years and previously was in the U.S. Navy. The school is so small that there are hardly enough students to play on the team. The town's men have big ideas of how basketball practice and games should be run, showing up at practices and holding a special meet and greet with Dale in a barbershop. While Dale meets opposition, he eventually garners the trust of the basketball players and finds respect from some community members.
“There is a passion to high school sports that transcends anything that comes afterward; nothing in pro sports equals the intensity of a really important high school basketball game,” Roger Ebert wrote in his 1986 review. “’Hoosiers’ knows that.”
Screenwriter Angelo Pizzo expertly works in small-town politics coupled with sports. The story was loosely based on the “Milan Miracle,” when in 1954, the small school in Milan, IN had a successful basketball season and won the basketball championship. “He (Pizzo) knows all about high school politics and how the school board and the parents' groups always think they know more about basketball than the coach does,” Ebert wrote. “He knows about gossip, scandal and vengeance.”
