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...
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...
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...
Among Lee’s vivid memories is a picnic by the sea, a grand event sponsored by the Slad church choir. It was a trek of fifty-one miles to Weston-Super-Mare that most of the townsfolk stuffed themselves into hired five charabancs [SHarəˌbaNG, -ˌbaNGk]. Lined up,...
Arrabal’s Picnic on the Battlefield is a metaphor for the stupidity of war. He undermines picnic expectations as the obtuse (but well-meaning) Tépans march onto the battlefield to entertain their son Zapo. When the action begins, Zapo is surprised to see...
\Sirk wrote a picnic for Imitation of Life as a happy time away from a hectic work schedule. Needing a break, Lora Meredith collects her daughter Susie and her African American housekeeper Annie Johnson and calls her sometime lover Steve Archer, “Listen. . . I...
Frank’s Picnic Ground-Glendale, California (1959) captures American youth and the motorcar culture circa 1955-1956. It’s direct and unmediated, serving his intention to portray Americans as they are. The couples congregate in front of their cars. Because they are...
For 29 years, Captain Kangaroo was a children’s television show devised by Robert Keeshan, who played the title role. If you are old enough in 2022 to remember the show, you’ll recall how corny it was and likable. See Mary Voell Jones. Captain Kangaroo’s Picnic....
Anticipating the forthcoming publication of Henderson the Rain King, Bellow offered a picnic metaphor he meant to set a boundary between substantial and superficial art. Thinking of E.M. Forster, he quips, “No good novelist is going to invite us to a picnic merely to...
Adapting Andrew Garve’s The Megstone Plot and retitling it A Touch of Larceny, Hamilton’s screenplay hints he’s radically departed from the novel. Instead of Garve’s somber noir, Hamilton’s is a comedy. Easton’s ruse is to cast the...
