“How lovely it is to be free,” said Ursula, running swiftly here and there between the tree trunks, quite naked, her hair blowing loose. The grove was of beech trees, big and splendid, a steel-grey scaffolding of trunks and boughs, with level sprays of...
Smallwood’s picnic episode is not in Dumas, fils’s La Dame aux Camélias. According to Smallwood’s cinematic logic, however, romantic scenes in a natural setting are sure audience winners. The screen legend tells the obvious, “Love is the...
Von Stroheim’s picnic at Schuetzen Park is a loose adaptation of Frank Norris’s episode in McTeague. For the film, von Stroheim does not provide the food details. In the novel McTeague, Norris describes the Sieppe’s abundant picnic: clam chowder,...
Vidor’s picnic in La Bohème narrates the critical moment when Mimi and Rodolpho fall in love. It’s absent from the screenplay’s sources: Puccini’s opera La Bohème and Henri Muger’s Scenes de la vie bohème (Scenes of Bohemian Life). The legend tells that Her first...
Laurel and Hardy’s A Perfect Day is a picnic screw-up. The day begins with smiles, but nothing goes right, and they never get far from home. The picnic is an unfulfilled dream. *Compare this with Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick A Day’s Pleasure posted...
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...
Rumor has it that at a studio script reading of Browning’s Freaks, Irving Thalberg, MGM’s production head, is reputed to exclaim, “I asked for something horrifying. Well, I got it.” But when Freaks was released, it failed. Unlike...
McLeod’s It’s a Gift is a testament to W.C. Fields’s comic skill at making a picnic an utterly messy war zone. On their way west to California, the Bissonettes pronounced bis-on-nay and stopped for picnic lunch. Blithely ignoring a “Private...
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...
Following Cronin’s, The Citadel, Vidor understands how central the picnic episode is for exploring how success and money distort the lives of Andrew and Elizabeth Manson. Once idealistic, Dr. Andrew Manson has gone over to the dark side, considering money more...
