Joshua Logan’s Picnic (1956)

Joshua Logan’s Picnic (1956)

With Daniel Taradash’s screenplay, Logan’s Picnic departs radically from the drama, which does not have a picnic. Inge’s play skips the Picnic as Hal Carter and Madge Owens move to make love, and the curtain falls. Logan directed the Broadway...
Henry King’s Carousel (1956)

Henry King’s Carousel (1956)

King’s Carousel “A Real Nice Clambake” is full of picnicky camaraderie and good spirits, but it takes a nose-dive when the news comes that Julie Jordan’s lover Billy Bigelow, botched robbery is dead. King is casual about having the actors...
Nunnally Johnson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit  (1956)

Nunnally Johnson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956)

Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Johnson’s film strongly solidified the character of Tom Wrath as a symbol of mid-twentieth Century America, the rising generation of white, well-educated men striving for wealth and power in mid-century 19th...
Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956)

Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956)

The picnic episode is the eye of a romantic hurricane in which Marylee Hadley attempts to seduce Mitch Wayne. Marylee choses 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...
George Abbott & Stanley Donen’s Pajama Game (1957)

George Abbott & Stanley Donen’s Pajama Game (1957)

The Sleep-Tite company picnic is the musical centerpiece of Abbott and Donen’s The Pajama Game and is a reworking of  Bissell’s 7 ½ Cents, for which he wrote the screenplay. Once a year, company management and union employees meet on common ground to...
Douglas Sirk’s  Interlude (1957)

Douglas Sirk’s Interlude (1957)

Sirk’s Interlude is ninety minutes of adultery that ends when Helen says, “We have no chance. It’s impossible,” and Tonio replies, “You are right.” Salzburg is all sunshine when Tonio takes Helen for a picnic in his red...

Martin Ritt’s The Long Hot Summer (1958)

Martin Ritt and screenwriters shamelessly borrowed the picnic auction in Oklahoma! and plopped it into The Long Hot Summer, a mishmash of William Faulkner’s “Spotted Horses” (1931), “Barn Burning” (1939), and The Hamlet (1940), none of which includes a picnic. In this...
Guiseppi de Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958)

Guiseppi de Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958)

It’s a three-day dusty journey filled with “a continual tension in everything” when Don Fabrizio Corbèra and his family journey from Palermo to the hill town of Donnafugata. It’s unbearably hot and dusty. They stop at awful inns and eat putrid food. But on the third...
Jean Renoir’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1959)

Jean Renoir’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1959)

Jean Renoir’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe and Édouard  Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe share the same title, nothing more. Importantly, Renoir’s picnics, there are two of them, are comic jabs at Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World, which does not have a picnic. According...
Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959)

Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959)

\Sirk wrote a picnic for Imitation of Life as a happy time away from a hectic work schedule. Needing a break, Lora Meredith collects her daughter Susie and her African American housekeeper Annie Johnson and calls her sometime lover Steve Archer, “Listen. . . I...