Miller’s picnic captures an awkward, passionless-first-time-sexual encounter between Mick and Harry in Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
According to McCullers, Mick and Harry hardly speak, and the narrative breaks off before they have sex. Miller allows the picnickers more freedom of expression. They listen to the birds and the river and chatter until Mick asks, “Kiss me, Harry. Kiss me the way married people do.” So, they kiss and embrace as the scene (discretely) fades. When it’s over, it’s as if they are participants but not lovers. Harry says that he’s sorry. Mick is satisfied because she got what she wanted.
McCullers’s text has more food than sex. Miller’s picnic scants food. Mick’s mother packs jelly sandwiches, while Harry’s Jewish mother packs cold liver pudding,* chicken salad sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs with separate packages of salt and pepper, pie, and even paper napkins.
The cast: Sondra Lock as Mick; Wayne Smith as Harry; Alan Arkin as Mr. Singer
See Robert Ellis Miller. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968). The screenplay by Thomas C. Ryan is based on Carson McCullers’s novel (1940); Carson McCullers. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940. Streaming: https://archive.org/details/heart_201808
* It’s chopped liver in the Jewish kitchen. But in the American South, it’s liver pudding, liver mush, or poor boy’s pâté.