Claude Autant-Lara’s The Ripening Seed  (1954)

Claude Autant-Lara’s The Ripening Seed (1954)

Autant-Lara’s Le Blé en herbe is good at separating the dual aspects of love in Colette’s novel about adolescents and friends for years and learning about love while vacationing in Normandy. There are two parts to the narrative. In the first part, teenagers Philippe...
Andy Warhol’s Picnic (1955c.)

Andy Warhol’s Picnic (1955c.)

Warhol’s Picnic is an early work that lacks the pizazz of the later Pop paintings of the late 1960s.  Featured Image: Andy Warhol. Picnic (1955c.), watercolor, ink, gouache on paper.
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955)

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955)

The neat phrase “picnic, lightning” is a metaphor for transience and happenstance written by Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Lolita (1955). Awaiting a murder trial, Humbert begins a memoir, freely admitting moral decline and obsession with the...
Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955)

Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955)

David Dodge and Alfred Hitchcock had differing views on the character of John Robie, aka The Cat, and the hero of To Catch a Thief. Dodge disguised the thirty-four-year-old to look older and plumper; for his film, Hitchcock chose fifty-one-year-old Cary Grant to play...
Pablo Picasso’s La plage a la Garoupe (1955)

Pablo Picasso’s La plage a la Garoupe (1955)

Picasso’s social contacts in Antibes and Juan-les-Pins were varied. Among his American friends were Gerald and Sara Murphy, who rented Villa America in La Garoupe. At that time, Picasso was married to Olga Khokhlova, a ballet dancer. In 1955, Picasso began a...
P.H. Newby’s The Picnic at Sakkara (1955)

P.H. Newby’s The Picnic at Sakkara (1955)

Newby’s Picnic At Sakkara is a comic novel set during political and international turmoil in Egypt.   At the time of Newby’s action around 1946-47, the British were still in control of the Suez Canal, the Farouk regime was wobbling, and Egyptian nationalism led by the...

Elizabeth David’s Summer Cooking (1955/65)

David’s books are suffused with references to picnics. She could be informal or according to her whims, something she adopted from her youth, which she wrote about in Summer Cooking, “Picnic addicts  [like herself] seem to be roughly divided between those...
Joshua Logan’s Picnic (1956)

Joshua Logan’s Picnic (1956)

With Daniel Taradash’s screenplay, Logan’s Picnic departs radically from the drama, which does not have a picnic. Inge’s play skips the Picnic as Hal Carter and Madge Owens move to make love, and the curtain falls. Logan directed the Broadway...
Henry King’s Carousel (1956)

Henry King’s Carousel (1956)

King’s Carousel “A Real Nice Clambake” is full of picnicky camaraderie and good spirits, but it takes a nose-dive when the news comes that Julie Jordan’s lover Billy Bigelow, botched robbery is dead. King is casual about having the actors...