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...
Motley’s A rooftop party is a variation of a tar beach picnic. Couples are sitting at tables eating and drinking. Good spirits prevail. Motley’s typical attitude and his paintings invariable show African Americans happy in a world of easy living....
Plath’s “The Colossus” is specifically a jab at her dead father, Otto Plath, less clear an allusion to her husband, Ted Hughes. She had a stormy and pathological relationship with her long-dead Daddy, “Thirty years now I have labored,”...
According to Spark, Brodie might take the girls out for a lesson en plein aire in the Marcia Blaine school garden. It was a lesson and not a picnic. According to Ronald Neame’s film adaptation, there is a picnic sequence that is intended to be a recognition of...
Grass’s mordant picnic satire describes five dwarfs, all Nazis, all entertainers in Bebra’s “Theater at the Front,” gathering for a picnic feast on a beach in Normandy. The irony of pleasure is lost on them. Living in the present, Oskar and his friends are happy to...
Hanna and Barbera celebrate the adventures of Yogi Bear, living in Jellystone Park, who loves to steal “pic-a-nic” baskets. Yogi’s accomplice BooBoo, a bear cub, helps loot baskets from tourists. Yogi and BooBoo love sandwiches, sausages, cakes,...
Linen’s picnic contrasts the pleasure of the moment with the ruin of the past. The dead freighter has been plunked on a grassy meadow. A surrealistic vision of a topsy-turvy world some call magic realism.
There is a picnic in Terrence Young’s From Russia With Love (1963) but not in Ian Fleming’s novel. It’s inconsequential, shaken, but not stirred. See Terrence Young. From Russia With Love (1963). The screenplay by Richard Malbaum and Joanna Harwood is based on Ian...
A Place in the Country” and “The Picnic” illustrate the before and after of an affair. About ten years after they have ended their affair, Clem and Nettie, a girl, meet at Clem’s country place, attending a picnic set up by Clem’s wife...
Hemingway’s “Scott Fitzgerald” in A Moveable Feast recounts their sudden friendship. Among his anecdotes is their picnic on a drive from Lyons to Paris in 1925. Hemingway was uneasy with Fitzgerald’s character peculiarities, especially his...
Among Picasso’s many unappealing variations of Manet’s Le dejeuner sur l’herbe is a large sculpture of disunited figures. Great blobs of concrete, ironically, sitting on the grass. But there is no lunch, no food, no picnic. Featured Image: Carl Nesjar Pablo Picasso’s...
