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...
Bill Clary, a native of Valentines, Virginia, for whom Dinner on the Grounds was the first Sunday of August. But other regional churches held their revival meetings on the other Sundays so that there was no competition. Clary recollected that each family had its spot...
Eaton’s Family Picnic depicts a traditional family gathering around an outdoor brick fireplace. See Dorothy Eaton. Family Picnic (1930’s). Oil on canvas.
Schwartz’s evocation of a family picnic in a lush landscape. Featured Image: Family Picnic (1930s). Oil on canvas
The picnic-in-a-barn scene in Monkey Business is all fluff and an excuse for laughter. Trying to save a gangster’s daughter and his sweetheart, Lucille, imprisoned in a barn, Groucho and Chico enter with picnic gear. Sitting on a pile of hay, Groucho spreads a...
Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy intended his narrative to accentuate the pernicious effects of social and economic struggles; Josef Von Sternberg’s film narrative accentuates love and murder. Dreiser argued that von Sternberg and Paramount Pictures did not...
Bridge’s Peking Picnic is autofiction based on her life as the wife of the British Oriental Attaché in Peking. The romantic interlude suggests that Bridge’s real-life marriage to Owen O’Malley was no picnic. It’s the story of picnic romance...
Sample’s Church Super is his judgment of his wife Sylvia’s hometown in Westmore, Vermont. It’s dour and static. The supper is ordinary, but many details tell otherwise. Though the minister calls the picnickers for grace, many are already eating. A...
McLeod’s It’s a Gift is a testament to W.C. Fields’s comic skill, making a picnic an utterly war zone. On their way west to California, the Bissonettes pronounced bis-on-nay and stopped for a picnic lunch. Blithely ignoring a “Private Property...
The zany humor of “Just a Picnic at Whipsnade” is Heath Robinson’s trademark. Of the two picnics here, the lion has got the better deal. It also helps to know that Whipsnade is England’s biggest zoo, near Luton, an hour and twenty minutes north of London. Featured...
