The picnic episode is the eye of a romantic hurricane in which two might-be lovers, Marylee Hadley and Mitch Wayne, are momentarily at ease.
Marylee chooses the picnic ground because it’s where she and Mitch played and picnicked when they were teenagers. She remembers that once, she asked Mitch if he loved her. He didn’t then, and he doesn’t now. A constant reminder of her unrequited love is the heart she carved on a tree (still there) with the initials MH and MW.
Without giving too much of the narrative away, Marylee’s picnic is (yet) another attempt to seduce Mitch, who loves Lucy Moore, Marylee’s brother’s wife. Mitch is friendly, but that’s all. They banter, and as she spreads a picnic cloth, “I brought everything but rain and ants. . . Okay, correction, rain.”
Settling down, Marylee pops the champagne and says, “Let’s eat, drink, and be merry. Mitch quips, “We’ll eat, drink, and run.”
There’s a wicker basket, but we never see the food.
The cast: Dorothy Malone as Marylee Hadley and Rock Hudson as Mitch Wayne
See Douglas Sirk. Written on the Wind (1956). Screenplay by George Zuckerman based on Robert Wilder’s novel (1946). Sirk’s picnic is his creation. Robert Wilder’s Written on the Wind does not include the scene Sirk, and his screenwriters portray. Streaming at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-lC1QK9v74