Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969)

Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969)

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...
Terrence Young’s From Russia, With Love  (1963)

Terrence Young’s From Russia, With Love (1963)

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...
Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

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...
Bo Widerberg Elvira Madigan’s (1967)

Bo Widerberg Elvira Madigan’s (1967)

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...
Walt Disney’s  The Picnic (1930)

Walt Disney’s The Picnic (1930)

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,...
Sidney Pollack’s Out of Africa (1985)

Sidney Pollack’s Out of Africa (1985)

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...
Douglas McGrath’s Emma (1996)

Douglas McGrath’s Emma (1996)

By the last count, seven directors have filmed Austen’s Emma. None of them are definitive or even alike. A list is provided as a separate entry. McGrath’s Emma is lively, and his picnic episode at Donwell Abbey and Box Hill is reasonably close to...
Michel Gondry’sMood Indigo (2013)

Michel Gondry’sMood Indigo (2013)

The picnic in Gondry’s Mood Indigo [L’Écume des jours] is his invention, a goofy addition to Boris Vian’s surrealistic novel L’Écume des jours. * It’s the love story of Colin, who is manic and unpredictable, and Chloe, who is stable until she meets...
Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon (1913)

Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon (1913)

Picnicking sandwiches and much more food play an important part in the courtship of Billy Roberts, a wagon driver, and Saxon Brown, a laundress, in Jack London’s Valley of the Moon. Intending to propose marriage, Billy and Saxon drive into the hills beyond...
Charlie Chaplin’s A Day’s Pleasure (1919)

Charlie Chaplin’s A Day’s Pleasure (1919)

Chaplin’s A Day’s Pleasure called Charlie’s Picnic is an excursion in San Pedro harbor. It’s not a picnic, and Chaplin preferred A Day’s Pleasure as an ironic title because the story is a series of ironic misfortunes: seasickness, fistfights, and a return home that...