Bowles and Schuyler’s performance piece A Picnic Cantata: for Four Women’s Voices, Two Pianos, and Percussion (1954) is delightfully silly. It’s about a happy picnic that is intentionally nonsensical. The music by Bowles’ and the libretto by...
It’s a tender moment when Helen Shaw and Joel Aaron climb a hill to picnic and enjoy the view. They do not bring food or picnic gear but sit on the rock facing the sun. They are good friends, not lovers, and Aaron soon will be leaving Joel for Israel. Helen...
Bissell’s 7 ½ Cents is a light-hearted comedy about a garment factory in a small town in Iowa. Junction City is a shock to Sid Sorokin, the new superintendent of the Sleep Tite Pajama Company, because he used to be Chicago. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, he...
The horror of LeRoy’s The Bad Seed is serial killer Rhoda Penmark, a darling little girl with blond pigtails and blue eyes who murders a classmate at a school picnic because she covets his penmanship medal (pun intended). The picnic food is present but...
Rhoda Penmark is a successful serial killer whose career begins at a school picnic. She looks innocent, a darling little girl with blond pigtails and blue eyes. But Rhoda’s interior is ruthless and murderous. Wanting the penmanship medal for herself...
Have a motorcar, have a picnic. Featured Image: Roger-Viollet Agency. Couple Seated before a 4CV. Camargue (France) ( 1954) (File 340.2); http://www.roger-viollet.fr/agence.aspx
Thomas’ life and marriage were tumultuous. So in November 1953, when Caitlin Thomas entered St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York looking for her husband, she expected a positive answer to her question, “Is the bloody man dead yet?” What she got was “Not yet,” for he was...
Autant-Lara’s Le Blé en herbe is good at separating the dual aspects of love in Colette’s novel about adolescents and friends for years and learning about love while vacationing in Normandy. There are two parts to the narrative. In the first part, teenagers Philippe...
David Dodge and Alfred Hitchcock had differing views on the character of John Robie, aka The Cat, and the hero of To Catch a Thief. Dodge disguised the thirty-four-year-old to look older and plumper; for his film, Hitchcock chose fifty-one-year-old Cary Grant to play...
Anderson series of Idylls are picnicky, filled with people happily dancing and singing on the grass. He called the first Bacchanal and the other Idylls. In an interview, Anderson referenced Matisse’s Luxe, Calme et Volupté as a modern arcadian idyll but does not...
