Günter Grass’sThe Tin Drum (1961)

Günter Grass’sThe Tin Drum (1961)

Grass’s mordant picnic satire describes five dwarfs, all Nazis, all entertainers in Bebra’s “Theater at the Front,” gathering for a picnic feast on a beach in Normandy. The irony of pleasure is lost on them. Living in the present, Oskar and his friends are happy to...
William Hanna and Joseph Barbera’s Yogi Bear (1961)

William Hanna and Joseph Barbera’s Yogi Bear (1961)

Hanna and Barbera celebrate the adventures of Yogi Bear, living in Jellystone Park, who loves to steal “pic-a-nic” baskets. Yogi’s accomplice BooBoo, a bear cub, helps loot baskets from tourists. Yogi and BooBoo love sandwiches, sausages, cakes,...
Terrance Young’s From Russia with Love (1963)

Terrance Young’s From Russia with Love (1963)

There is a picnic in Terrence Young’s From Russia With Love (1963) but not in Ian Fleming’s novel. It’s inconsequential, shaken, but not stirred.   See Terrence Young. From Russia With Love (1963). The screenplay by Richard Malbaum and Joanna Harwood is based on Ian...
Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (1964)

Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (1964)

Hemingway’s “Scott Fitzgerald”  in A Moveable Feast recounts their sudden friendship. Among his anecdotes is their picnic on a drive from Lyons to Paris in 1925. Hemingway was uneasy with Fitzgerald’s character peculiarities, especially his...
Ian Fleming’s Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang (1964)

Ian Fleming’s Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang (1964)

On a Sunday in August, Commander Caractacus Pott announces Mimsie, the mother, Jemima and Jeremy, eight-year-old twins: “Today is going to be a roaster,” he said, “a scorcher. There’s only one thing to do, and that’s for us to take a...
Gary Winogrand’s White Sands Monument (1964)

Gary Winogrand’s White Sands Monument (1964)

Winogrand’s photograph White Sands Monument is a stunning view of a picnic table in the White Sands Monument National Monument in New Mexico. The white dunes are composed of powdery gypsum. The figures have left their Chevrolet and set out a picnic lunch under the...
NASA’s Gemini 3 Spacecraft (1965)

NASA’s Gemini 3 Spacecraft (1965)

NASA’s space food makes a picnic. Aboard Gemini 3, “The Molly Brown,” Virgil “Gus” Grissom, and John Young rocketed and enjoyed a picnic of corned beef sandwiches purchased at a local deli in Cocoa Beach. As Grissom began to eat it, the...