King Vidor’s The Citadel (1938)

King Vidor’s The Citadel (1938)

Following Cronin’s, The Citadel, Vidor understands how central the picnic episode is for exploring how success and money distort the lives of Andrew and Elizabeth Manson. Once idealistic, Dr. Andrew Manson has gone over to the dark side, considering money more...
James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1939)

James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1939)

A hodge-podge of wordplay. Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1939), links picnics with lust. You won’t need be lonesome, Lizzy my love, when your beau gets his glut of cold meat and hot soldiering or wake in winter, window machree, but snore sung in my old Balbriggan surtout....
Victor Fleming’s Gone With the Wind (1939)

Victor Fleming’s Gone With the Wind (1939)

Arriving at Twelve Oaks garden party, Gerald O’Hara is pleased to say, “Well, John Wilkes, it’s a grand day you’ll be havin’ for the barbecue.” It’s momentous because it is the beginning of Scarlett and Rhett Butler’s...
Victor Fleming’s The Wizard ofOz (1939)

Victor Fleming’s The Wizard ofOz (1939)

Fleming’s 1939 film The Wizard of Oz omits Baum’s picnic episode. Dorothy’s wicker is meant only to carry Toto. See Victor Fleming. The Wizard of Oz (1939). Screenplay by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf is based on L. Frank...
Sam Wood’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)

Sam Wood’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)

Wood’s romantic picnic on a mountain in Goodbye, Mr. Chips is his idea. James Hilton’s Charles Chipping and Katherine Ellis meet while hiking in the Lake District, fall “head over heels in love,” and marry soon after. Wood sets the mountain...
Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust (1939)

Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust (1939)

The Day of the Locust may have been the best novel ever written about Hollywood, but Nathanael West and his publisher Random House miscalculated. They believed a biting satire of the film industry and its insidious confusion of illusion and reality would sell, but it...
Louis Le Brocquy’s A Picnic (1940)

Louis Le Brocquy’s A Picnic (1940)

Le Brocquy’s second wife, Anne Madden, remembers that the model in A Picnic was a friend. She preferred not to remember the woman in black and white (next to the umbrella) is Le Brocquy’s first wife, Jane Stoney. (She’s the same pensive woman in the portrait The Woman...