Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust has two picnics. But as the screenwriter for James Ivory’s film, she included only Olivia Rivers, a British colonial wife, picnic with the Nawab, the local ruler of a small state in central India. Bored with her husband, Rivers...
As in Lawrence’s Women in Love, Russell’s water party, a euphemism for a picnic, begins happily in the bright light of the early afternoon but ends dismally in the evening, partially illuminated by gaudy party lights. More like a country fair than an...
Young’s picnic Russia With Love is not in Ian Fleming’s novel. Young’s picnic begins when Bond and his current lover Sylvia Trench are punting in a boat on /River Cherwell in Oxford. It’s summer. They are tied up in the shade, dressed in bathing suits, and comfortably...
If you do not know the picnickers are Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, bank robbers and murderers, Penn’s picnics seem ordinary. Penn figured that picnics make good human interest episodes and would humanize Bonnie and Clyde’s selfishness and essential...
Widerberg’s Elvira Madigan has two picnics. The first is a lover’s idyll; the second is sad and deadly. When Elvira Madigan, aka Hedvig Jensen, a circus performer, and Count Sixten Sparre, a married cavalry officer, eloped, their life together was a picnic. Their...
“The Mole begged as a favour to be allowed to unpack it all by himself,” In Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1931.
Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe is a French euphemism for picnic in English. Pique-nique was not used for an alfresco luncheon but for dinner indoors, repas de pique-nique. When it was exhibited in 1863 at the Salon des Refusés, the painting was titled Le...
Disney’s seven-minute cartoon The Picnic packs as many picnic conventions as possible: a motorcar drive to the country, a stream, shady tree, a wicker basket, a gingham cloth jammed with a gourmand feast of sandwiches, Swiss cheese, mustard, pickles, olives, honey,...
The Pic-Nic Society was a London club devoted to theatrical entertainment, lavish dinners, and gambling. The Pic-Nics notoriety invited scandal and satire. Burney’s The Pic-Nic Orchestra is a knock-off of James Gillray’s The Pic-Nic Orchestra. Caricatures...
Blixen’s Out of Africa is a memoir without picnics. But Pollack and his screenwriter Kurt Luedke have added two picnic episodes that reveal Blixen’s characteristic vanity and romantic nature. Neither is a particularly happy picnic. The first picnic is in...
