Richard Lester’s Help! (1965)

Richard Lester’s Help! (1965)

Help! It is Richard Lester’s romp with The Beatles. Among the many scenes is a brief picnic in the snow that sets up singing “Ticket to Ride.” The song and the picnic are completely disconnected. And there’s no picnic basket when the quartet sits at a red and white...
Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music (1965)

Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music (1965)

Wise’s The Sound of Music picnic is among film’s happiest and most exuberant picnics. It’s his creation because Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical does not have  picnic. Maria and the children sing “Do-Re-Mi” while marching in the...
Jacqueline Wheldon’s  Mrs. Bratbe’s August Picnic  (1966)

Jacqueline Wheldon’s Mrs. Bratbe’s August Picnic (1966)

When a child is murdered at Bratbe’s picnic, a public and family scandal erupts. Then it begins to rain. Hytha Bratbe’s picnic is an annual event for about 800 invited guests, including the Prime Minister, at her estate in the West Sussex Downs, surpassing...
Joan Lindsay’s Picnic a Hanging Rock (1967)

Joan Lindsay’s Picnic a Hanging Rock (1967)

Ironically, the picnic at Hanging Rock overpowers the narrative though it is the novel’s shortest section. The events and ambiance are so actual that readers accept the narrative at face value. Lindsay helped set this delusion by suggesting, “Whether...
Ted Hughes’s Iron Man (1968)

Ted Hughes’s Iron Man (1968)

Five years after Sylvia Plath’s suicide, Hughes wrote Iron Man as entertainment to help their children Frieda and Nicholas deal with their mother’s death. The story is a fantasy about a colossal Iron Man (from somewhere unknown in the universe) with an appetite for...
Daniel Celantano’s Picnic (1945c.)

Daniel Celantano’s Picnic (1945c.)

Celentano’s painting Picnic depicts working-class people happily at leisure. The picnic is simple without frills or elegance. A family picnic in the country. the picnic blanket is spread out under a tree. Seems to be several families, and they all cluster on or around...
Ned Rorems’s Picnic on the Marne (1967)

Ned Rorems’s Picnic on the Marne (1967)

Rorem’s bitchy recollection of a “collapsed romance” inspired Picnic on the Marne: Seven Waltzes. When his romance with Claude Benedick was hot in the 1950sRorem was lovey-dovy. But in 1967, all that was left was rancor. Rorem’s The New York Diary (1967) spews his...
Joseph Strick’s Ulysses (1967)

Joseph Strick’s Ulysses (1967)

On June 16, 1906, unknown to each other, Leopold Bloom and Molly Bloom remember the picnic on the Hill of Howth when they agreed to marry sixteen years earlier. a popular park outside of Dublin. As part of her soliloquy in which Molly recalls the day, she remembers...
Joanna Russ’s Picnic on Paradise (1968)

Joanna Russ’s Picnic on Paradise (1968)

Russ’s sci-fi novel Picnic on Paradise, a sci-fi thriller, takes place on Paradise, a resort planet that is a war zone. Paradise is a resort planet that becomes a war zone in which Alyx, a woman from the past, is brought to life in a future world. She is charged with...
John O’Hara’s “A Few Trips and Some Poetry” (1968)

John O’Hara’s “A Few Trips and Some Poetry” (1968)

O’Hara’s “A Few Trips and Some Poetry “is a long story about a picnic where the pleasure of sharing is sexual. O’Hara’s picnic-sex episode provides a memory that lasts a lifetime. What is served at this picnic is not the usual fare;...