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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Ritt and screenwriters shamelessly borrowed the picnic auction in Oklahoma! and plopped it into The Long Hot Summer, a mish-mash of William Faulkner’s “Spotted Horses” (1931), “Barn Burning” (1939), and The Hamlet (1940), none of which...
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...
Renoir’s title of Le déjeuner sur l’herbe has mislead some to think it’s an allusion to Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe but it’s not so. Renoir’s satire aims for Brave New World, Huxley’s, a dystopian world in which science and industrial...
\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...
