Lester’s The Three Musketeers is a comic adaptation of Alexandre Duma’s novel. The halte de chasse on the royal hunt portrays the lavish preparation for an outdoor meal fit for a king. Louis XIV spent many hours hunting, and there is a passing...
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...
Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest has been successfully adapted by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose slow-moving narrative presents the youthful heroine’s adulterous affair and how it wrecks her life. Only one of Fontane’s picnics is articulated. Effi and her lover, Major...
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...
Charles Sturridge’s strawberry picnic in Brideshead Revisited is mainly faithful to Waugh’s novel. With Sebastian Flyte’s encouragement, Sebastian easily gets Charles to cut class at Oxford for a day in the country. He announces, “I’ve got a motor car and a basket of...
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...
