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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Johnson’s film strongly solidified the character of Tom Wrath as a symbol of mid-twentieth Century America, the rising generation of white, well-educated men striving for wealth and power in mid-century 19th...
Ernest Hemingway thought Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was trash. However, Americans still readjusting to World War Two and its aftermath thought made it a best-seller. Within a year of publication, Nunnally Johnson directed a faithful film...
The picnic episode is the eye of a romantic hurricane in which two might-be lovers, Marylee Hadley and Mitch Wayne, are momentarily at ease. Marylee chooses the picnic ground because it’s where she and Mitch played and picnicked when they were teenagers. She remembers...
