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...
Ernest Hemingway thought Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was trash. However, Americans still readjusting to World War Two and its aftermath thought made it a best-seller. Within a year of publication, Nunnally Johnson directed a faithful film...
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 picnic in Dick’s Eye in the Sky is characteristic of his style of mixing shifting planes of reality and illusion, laced with sardonic humor. The picnic takes when the real world collides accidentally with an alternate world it’s the result of an...
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...
No food. Diners sit at long tables waiting. Spencer said he forgot it, but this seems disingenuous and intentionally humorous because it defies the expectation that a picnic will include abundant food and drink. See Stanley Spencer. Dinner on the Hotel Lawn (1956-57)....
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...
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...
Among Lee’s vivid memories is a picnic by the sea, a grand event sponsored by the Slad church choir. It was a trek of fifty-one miles to Weston-Super-Mare that most of the townsfolk stuffed themselves into hired five charabancs [SHarəˌbaNG, -ˌbaNGk]. Lined up,...
