Fellini’s scampagnata, picnic, in Amarcord, a semi-autobiographical narrative, tells about an ordinary alfresco lunch set in the shade of the yard of a farmhouse. What is served is unknown, but there are bottles of raffia-bound Chianti, a bowl of hard-boiling eggs,...
Just shy of the centenary of Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Taylor and the Shermans film is a musical. Becky Thatcher’s birthday picnic is recreated as rollicking July Fourth holiday picnic. It’s not Twain’s classic, but it’s light-hearted fun....
Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is an adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s novel about how the Valentine’s Day picnic of the Appleyard College girls ended badly. Inexplicably, two girls and a teacher disappear—and are never found. Weir and his screenwriter...
In E Fontane’s tet, Effi and her lover Major von Crampas eat at a simple wooden table behind the dunes to avoid the Baltic’s gusty winds. A servant has set a cloth with slices of cold meat, rolls, and red wine (served in delicate glasses). Fassbinder’s picnics, of...
Schlöndorff does his best to remain faithful to Grass’s mordant picnic satire. Grass was pleased: “In Schlöndorff, I found a true interlocutor, someone who provoked me with his questions, who delved into the heart of the subject, and who, during our dialogue, forced...
Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is inspired by Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. Coppola adapted the action and characters to his conception of the “insane” war in Vietnam, and the beach party picnic is his addition to the narrative. Coppola ensures...
Bridges’s hunt picnic is faithful to Isabel Colegate’s gently melancholy novel of English gentry circa 1913, The Shooting Party. The title The Shooting Party is intended to suggest the larger “shooting party” of the looming world war. Though they know it, Sir...
Sturridge’s strawberry picnic in Brideshead Revisited is mainly faithful to Waugh’s novel. Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder’s idyllic picnic and intensely close friendship is a moment of respite in their otherwise often messy lives. Particularly Sebastian’s....
At Byrum’s July Fourth picnic, lovers cuddle, kiss, and roll on the grass. Larry Darrell wants more, but Isabel Bradley wants to wait. At the lover’s picnic in Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, never touch or kiss or even hold hands As in...
The Marabar Caves picnic is a metaphor for the irreconcilability of Anglo-Indian relationships. Lean’s careful version of the catastrophic “Caves” episode, like Forster’s, constitutes the middle third of A Passage to India. Dr. Aziz’s...
