Charles McCarry’s The Secret Lovers (1970)

Charles McCarry’s The Secret Lovers (1970)

The picnic in McCarry’s The Secret Lovers, a Cold War spy-versus-spy novel, is a sly allusion to Édouard Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe. When Paul Christopher’s boss David Patchen complains that Impressionists bore him and “Picnics explain nothing,”...
Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Stugatsky’s Roadside Picnic (1972)

Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Stugatsky’s Roadside Picnic (1972)

The Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic is somewhere in Canada, where specialists pick through the debris left by careless Extraterrestrial picnickers. There is no picnic.The picnic is a metaphor offered by knowledgeable scientist Valentine Pillman to explain the...
Laurent de Brunhoff’s Babar Visits Another Planet (1972)

Laurent de Brunhoff’s Babar Visits Another Planet (1972)

Brunhoff ‘s Babar Visits Another Planet (1972) begins at the start of ­­yet another family picnic until a rocketship upsets the fun. Before they realize the situation, Babar, Celeste, their children Pom, Flora, Arthur, cousin Alexander, and Zephir, the monkey, are...
J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Khrishnapur (1973)

J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Khrishnapur (1973)

Farrell’s picnic in The Siege of Khrishnapur siege is purposely mischaracterized as entertainment for local Indians watching Sepoys attack the official Residency of the East India Company’s residence. It’s a fictional addition to a historical siege lasting five months...
William Goldman’s The Princess Bride (1973)

William Goldman’s The Princess Bride (1973)

Goldman’s The Princess Bride takes a satiric jab at a traditional lovers’s picnic. “Indeed,” he writes in the novel, Vizzini, “had set out a little picnic spread. From the knapsack that he always carried, he had taken a small handkerchief, and on it, he has...
Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers (1973)

Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers (1973)

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...
Frederico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973)

Frederico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973)

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,...
Don Taylor’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1973)

Don Taylor’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1973)

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....

Beryl Bainbridge’s The Bottle Factory Outing (1974)

Bainbridge’s idea of picnic fun is a biting satire of an English company picnic during which everything that can go awry does, including murder. Two friends, Brendass and Freda, organize a picnic for the employees at an Italian wine and spirits shop on Hope Street in...