Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust has two picnics. But as the screenwriter for James Ivory’s film, she included only Olivia Rivers, a British colonial wife, picnic with the Nawab, the local ruler of a small state in central India. Bored with her husband, Rivers...
As in Lawrence’s Women in Love, Russell’s water party, a euphemism for a picnic, begins happily in the bright light of the early afternoon but ends dismally in the evening, partially illuminated by gaudy party lights. More like a country fair than an...
Terrence Young’s picnic in From Russia With Love does not happen in Ian Fleming’s novel. It’s inconsequential, shaken but not stirred. Young’s picnic begins when Bond and his current lover, Sylvia Trench, are punting in a boat on /River Cherwell in Oxford. It’s...
Arthur Penn’s picnics seem ordinary. Penn figured that picnics make good human interest episodes and would humanize Bonnie and Clyde’s selfishness and essential nastiness. The Parker family picnic is a temporary lull for Bonnie and Clyde, who are...
Widerberg’s Elvira Madigan has two picnics. The first is a lover’s idyll; the second is sad and deadly. When Elvira Madigan, aka Hedvig Jensen, a circus performer, and Count Sixten Sparre, a married cavalry officer, eloped, their life together was a picnic. Their...
Blixen’s Out of Africa is a memoir without picnics. But Pollack and his screenwriter Kurt Luedke have added two picnic episodes that reveal Blixen’s characteristic vanity and romantic nature. Neither is a particularly happy picnic. The first picnic is in...
By the last count, seven directors have filmed Austen’s Emma. None of them are definitive or even alike. A list is provided as a separate entry. McGrath’s Emma is lively, and his picnic episode at Donwell Abbey and Box Hill is reasonably close to...
Larned’s recipe for a picnic staple: Chicken Salad “Cook chicken in boiling water, when half done add salt, a slice each of salt pork, lemon, and onion, a bit of bay leaf, and a piece of red pepper. Cool in the stock, drain, and cut in cubes. Cover them...
Antonia is the matriarch of an extended family: her daughter, child, and partner, her friends, and castoffs who need a home. Each year, a long table is set in the barnyard for the extended family to picnic. See Marleen Gorris. Antonia’s Line (1995). Screenplay by...
A second picnic in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows is a stark contrast to the Spring picnic on the riverbank. Water Rat is restless as the fall season is ending, and as he wanders about rather aimlessly, he comes upon Sea Rat and invites him to lunch....
