Simkhovitch’s The Picnic is a day of leisure, but the group seems mirthless. They sit on bare earth, and each is unsmiling and subdued. There is an absence of picnic joy as a small picnic cloth is spread around which they all gather. A man in a bathing suit reclines,...
Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Franklin’s Bullfighter from Brooklyn recall their meriendas at “La Playa,” Franklin’s camp on the Manzanares River in the summer of 1931. Franklin recalls that he had time to play because he was...
Dreiser disapproved of von Sternberg’s An American Tragedy. He argued Von Sternberg and screenwriter Samuel Hoffenstein played down the grinding forces of social and financial pressures and accentuated the love story of Clyde Griffiths’ infatuation with a wealthy...
Ford’s “Banquet at Calanques” makes his life in 1932 seem picnicky. He remembered that brilliant day and the “Homeric feast” enthusiastically. But by the time it was published in 1937, Ford was at various times ailing and depressed,...
Sample’s Church Super is his judgment of his wife Sylvia’s hometown in Westmore, Vermont. It’s dour and static. The supper is ordinary, but many details tell otherwise. Though the minister calls the picnickers for grace, many are already eating. A...
The poise of a young couple picnicking in Fleetwood-Walker’s Amity is ingratiating. The young man stares at the young woman, who looks lost in thought. She twirls a daisy, suggesting youth and innocence. The picnic basket beside her shows apples, a symbolic suggestion...
When Mary Phelps Jacob was nicknamed Polly, when she married her first husband, she became Mary Phelps, Jacob Peabody. Harry Crosby, her second husband, renamed her Caresse Crosby. He liked the alliteration and the pun on caress. When Harry died a suicide in 1929,...
Betty Boop, a pretty, silly woman with a sense of humor, was created by Max Fleischer but drawn by Bud Counihan. Among the cartoon strip episodes is a picnic poking self-deprecating fun at Betty’s career as a movie star, “And I’m to ride in this...
The label tells all.
The Green Pastures imagines an eternal fish-fry-picnic in a Heaven inhabited only by African Americans. It’s a faithful adaptation of Ol’ Man Adam, Roark Bradford’s racist version of the Old Testament episodes told from a supposed African American...
