Only 2:07 seconds of screen time, but it’s an unpleasant crackling picnic that ends with a slap in the face. Despite the southern Florida heat, Charles Foster Kane and Susan Alexander are lounging by a crackling fireplace in Xanadu, their palatial estate: he in...
Hitchcock added a picnic to the screenplay of Rebecca to reveal Jack Flavell’s intention to blackmail Max De Winter for the murder of his deceased wife, Rebecca. Flavell’s disquieting revelation occurs on the day of the inquest regarding Rebecca’s...
Lee’s photograph of The Blessing at Dinner on the Grounds at the All-Day Community Sing, Pie Town, New Mexico (1940) records a community’s religious and social life at the behest of the Farm Services Bureau. See Lee’s collection of photographs of the...
Three soldiers picnicking on the grass lookup watching antiaircraft fire. Their easy postures belie their anxiety. This jarring juxtaposition of peace and war in 1940 is Edward Ardizzone’s record of the Nazi air force lightning attacks on the English and French...
Betjeman’s picnics are filled with the nostalgia of his youth. The earliest appears in Cornwall (1934), a series of The Shell County Guides that he and John Beddington conceptualized. A photograph of boys at a picnic (perhaps Betjeman among them ) shows the group...
Lee’s A Family Picnic on the Fourth of July at Vale, Oregon (1941) is a photographic document of a family picnicking on the running board of their Ford. The doors are open, and Mom and Dad sit on the running boards. Children sit on the ground beside a picnic cloth....
The yellow basket and the yellow summer hat in They Arrived in Pittsburgh suggest that there will be a picnic. The grimy factory stacks spewing smoke suggest otherwise. The basket and hat symbolize the hope that in Pittsburgh (or any other industrial city), the...
On a fantastic day in 1941, Wolcott photographed picnickers on the Sarasota beach. She was working for the Farm Services Administration, documenting contemporary American life. Among her subjects was picnicking, which she found in serval guises on the beach and...
LeRoy’s Random Harvest picnic is phony. (It’s also original to the screenplay.) Smithy and Paula sit on fake grass beside an artificial stream with real goldfish. It’s props like these Nathaniel West had pulverized in his Hollywood satire The Day of...
Buried in Gastronomical Me and the story Fisher’s first oyster is her memory of a joyous school picnic at the Huntington School for Girls. Fisher remembers t “Hungry shrieking,” girls “at half past noon a procession of house-boys would come...
