M.F.K. Fisher’s “The Pleasures of Picnics” (1957)

M.F.K. Fisher’s “The Pleasures of Picnics” (1957)

Fisher sets rules for picnics in stone. In “The Pleasures of Picnics,” she declares people who do not like picnics must be “dismissed immediately.” Fisher’s “true” picnic (and maybe yours?) must be outdoors and away from home....
George Abbott & Stanley Donen’s Pajama Game (1957)

George Abbott & Stanley Donen’s Pajama Game (1957)

The Sleep-Tite company picnic is the musical centerpiece of Abbott and Donen’s The Pajama Game and is a reworking of  Bissell’s 7 ½ Cents, for which he wrote the screenplay. Once a year, company management and union employees meet on common ground to...
Philip K. Dick’s Eye in the Sky (1957)

Philip K. Dick’s Eye in the Sky (1957)

The picnic in Dick’s Eye in the Sky is characteristic of his style of mixing shifting planes of reality and illusion, laced with sardonic humor. The picnic takes when the real world collides accidentally with an alternate world it’s the result of an...
Douglas Sirk’s  Interlude (1957)

Douglas Sirk’s Interlude (1957)

Sirk’s Interlude is ninety minutes of adultery that ends when Helen says, “We have no chance. It’s impossible,” and Tonio replies, “You are right.” Salzburg is all sunshine when Tonio takes Helen for a picnic in his red...
Stanley Spencer’s  Dinner on the Hotel Lawn (1957)

Stanley Spencer’s Dinner on the Hotel Lawn (1957)

No food. Diners sit at long tables waiting. Spencer said he forgot it, but this seems disingenuous and intentionally humorous because it defies the expectation that a picnic will include abundant food and drink. See Stanley Spencer. Dinner on the Hotel Lawn (1956-57)....
William Klein’s Fashion Models at a Picnic (1958)

William Klein’s Fashion Models at a Picnic (1958)

When Aaron Schuman asked Klein if he dreamed  in black and white, Klein shot back, “In black and white, of course.” But his photograph Tatiana + Marie Rose + Camels, Morocco, he had it both ways.  Featured Image:  William Klein. Tatiana + Marie Rose + Camels, Morocco,...

Martin Ritt’s The Long Hot Summer Picnic Basket Auction (1958)

Ritt and screenwriters shamelessly borrowed the picnic auction in Oklahoma! and plopped it into The Long Hot Summer, a mish-mash of William Faulkner’s “Spotted Horses” (1931), “Barn Burning” (1939), and The Hamlet (1940), none of which...
Guiseppi de Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958)

Guiseppi de Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958)

It’s a three-day dusty journey filled with “a continual tension in everything” when Don Fabrizio Corbèra and his family journey from Palermo to the hill town of Donnafugata. It’s unbearably hot and dusty. They stop at awful inns and eat putrid food. But on the third...
Jean Renoir’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1959)

Jean Renoir’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1959)

Renoir’s title of Le déjeuner sur l’herbe has mislead some to think it’s an allusion to Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe but it’s not so. Renoir’s satire aims for Brave New World, Huxley’s, a dystopian world in which science and industrial...