Leonora Carrington’s Pastoral (1950)

Leonora Carrington’s Pastoral (1950)

As with many of Carrington’s surrealistic paintings, they are enigmas. Maybe they are snapshots of her inner life—a mix of personal relationships, dreams, alchemy, astrology, myth, and probably alcohol and drugs. You may find the compositions appealing dream-visions...
Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950)

Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950)

David’s favorite picnic food is tian. She asserts that it’s simple for the experienced cook, especially if you have a tian, the Provençal earthenware casserole it is cooked in. You also need freshly baked bread, butter, cheese, and wine. David’s...
Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies (1951)

Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies (1951)

Time and details in Beckett’s Malone Dies are contradictory and often obscure. Events of the narrative are confusing, especially as it reaches a bloody climax that ends when Malone hacks six to death at a picnic. The picnic is narrated by the protagonist Malone...
George Stevens. A Place in the Sun (1951)

George Stevens. A Place in the Sun (1951)

Stevens’s A Place in the Sun is a rework of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. He renames the characters, too, so that Clyde Griffiths becomes George Eastman. It’s like renaming Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz or Tarzan. He and his screenwriters are emphatic...
John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951)

John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951)

Bill Masen and Josella Platon, exhausted survivors of vicious triffids, mutant plants with a taste for human flesh and blood, are stranded in a ruined landscape of Southampton. Wistfully, they are waiting to escape to Isle of Wight, a new Eden, which has been cleared...
George Stevens. A Place in the Sun (1951)

George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (1951)

Stevens’s A Place in the Sun is a rework of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. He renames the characters, too, so that Clyde Griffiths becomes George Eastman. It’s like renaming Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz or Tarzan. He and his screenwriters are emphatic...
Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon (1952)

Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon (1952)

Wilder added the picnic to Love in the Afternoon as a setting for comic action and romantic courtship. His sources for the film Paul Anet’s Ariene, juene file Russe (1920), and Paul Czinner’s film adaption The Loves of Ariene (1931) do not have picnics....
Edna Ferber’s Giant (1952)

Edna Ferber’s Giant (1952)

Giant is Ferber’s novel about how a Virginia belle, Leslie Lynton, learns to be a Texan. Among her lessons is what to eat during a Texas-style picnic at her husband Reata, her husband Bick Jordan’s ranch. At first, Leslie realizes what she is looking at is...