Daily Archives: Sunday, May 24, 2015

  • A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Woody Allen (1982)

    Few people think it’s one of Woody Allen’s best but I liked A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy thirty years ago and I like it now.  The inspiration is evidently (as well as Shakespeare!) Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night – this is a farce in a period setting (the first decade of the twentieth century) and all the action is concentrated within a few hours.  The movie is different from most of Woody Allen’s work in other respects too:  it has a country rather than an urban setting and there’s Mendelssohn on the soundtrack (which also serves to connect the piece with the magical Max Reinhardt screen version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream).  It’s a pity that the BFI had such a lousy print (they apologised) that it was hard to appreciate the grading of light and the enchanted darkness in Gordon Willis’s cinematography.

    The people in the story swap sexual partners and Woody Allen shifts his usual identity.  His character Andrew works on Wall Street; when he’s not at the office, he’s a crackpot inventor, trying to find ways to fly and so on:  his latest invention, a ‘spirit ball’ that communicates with the next world, is pivotal to the plot.  Andrew and his wife Adrian (Mary Steenburgen) are hosting a weekend visit from her cousin Leopold (Jose Ferrer) and his decades-younger fiancée Ariel (Mia Farrow).  (The spirit ball is ridiculed by Leopold, a philosophy professor and a rigorous rationalist.)  The other house guests are Andrew’s friend Max (Tony Roberts), a randy doctor, and his latest girlfriend of a few hours, a nurse called Dulcy (Julie Hagerty).  For the most part, the characters’ speech rhythms are comically ahead of their time – they sound to be long post-Freudian New Yorkers – although Jose Ferrer’s readings are so dexterous that he’s persuasive both as a creature of the era in which the film is set and as a contemporary of the others.  With the exception of Tony Roberts, all the performers look in period – including (thanks to the specs he wears here and the way his hair’s done) Woody Allen himself.  The gathering of the party is leisurely and A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy preliminary for a little too long.  The shots of local animal, bird and insect life in the countryside around feel like padding but every organism seems to be preparing to have it off and, once the humans’ sex drives get a grip, the film’s action is pleasingly swift.

    Jose Ferrer is outstanding as the pompous, super-cultured Leopold who turns out to be at least as lecherous as the next man and who gets his sceptic’s comeuppance in the climax to the film.  Ferrer’s acting has much more depth than anyone else’s – his controlled wit also makes him the funniest performer in the cast, though Woody Allen runs him a good second.  The character of Max is much thinner and not that different from other roles Tony Roberts has played in Allen movies but Roberts is able and likeable.  Mia Farrow, Mary Steenburgen and Julie Hagerty are physically distinct enough but their voices tend to blur when the camera is at some distance away (a problem made worse by the loss of visual tonal distinction in this particular print).  All six of the actors are splendid, though, in ensemble scenes like the rhythmical outdoor dinner table sequence.  It comes as a surprise, for a Woody Allen film, that, once Adrian has got rid of her sexual block, it’s implied that her and Andrew’s marriage is going to be plain sailing.   It’s a surprise too for Woody Allen to allow there to be a spirit world – but, when we see the ghosts in the final sequence, it’s clearly a world in which the sexual impress of human life still holds sway.

    8 January 2012

  • A Midsummer Night’s Dream

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle (1935)

    Neil Brand’s introduction in BFI was interrupted by a shout of ‘Get on with it!’  This was a lone heckler and Brand wasn’t thrown as Philip Kemp had been in NFT1 a couple of years ago[1] but you felt for him all the same.  There really is no justice:  this was one of the most polished, audible and informative intros I’ve heard among many at BFI – the impatient man in the audience didn’t know how lucky he was.  Neil Brand placed A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the context of Warner Brothers’ more usual and commercial products of the mid-1930s.   I guess that, in order to have any chance of box-office success, the Dream had to be spectacular:  viewed at this distance in time, its visual effects are unusual enough to be magical.  Max Reinhardt, William Dieterle and the cinematographer Hal Mohr (who won an Oscar for his work, as did the editor, Ralph Dawson) create an Athens wood with imagery that is phantasmagoric and somewhat Teutonic:  it occasionally suggests a live action Fantasia (which Disney made five years later).  You’re made to feel that you’re within the wood rather than observing it from a distance.  The rationing of the poetry, in the adaptation by Charles Kenyon and Mary C McCall Jr, is well judged.  There’s sufficient verse to mean that the words don’t take a back seat (although one or two of the wordless passages go on a bit too long); not so much of it to make the audience impatient with a film that’s all talk and hasn’t enough to meet the eye.   Some of the names on the credits reinforce your sense of witnessing a remarkable artistic hybrid:   Bronislava Nijinska choreographed the fairies’ dances; Mendelssohn’s music was re-orchestrated by Eric Wolfgang Korngold.

    Neil Brand explained how some of Warner Brothers’ contract players were given this opportunity to extend their range, most notably James Cagney, as Bottom.  He’s best when he acquires and eventually gets rid of the ass’s head – in between, there’s not a lot of substance or continuity of character.  There are moments during the Pyramus and Thisbe sequence when you feel it’s Cagney rather than Bottom who’s too full of his own importance as a performer.  As Puck, however, the fourteen year old Mickey Rooney is in every sense fantastic.  He has a young boy’s body but his physical and vocal agility get across the anarchic, quasi-malign aspects of Puck.  The fairies are played by children – some of them very young (Helen Westcott as Cobweb was only seven years old) and with individual personalities:  that helps to implicate the supernaturals in the story in a way that wouldn’t have happened if they’d been purely etherealised (and so neutralised).  Rooney has a belly laugh which, although overused, is extraordinary; his natural, self-confident line readings are a lesson to all the RSC and National Theatre actors (and directors) who – three-quarters of a century on from this movie – more crudely try to make Shakespeare ‘accessible’.  I thought the same of Dick Powell’s readings as Lysander, even though it seems from Wikipedia that everyone at the time (including Powell) thought he was miscast.  The lovers complement each other physically and temperamentally.  Olivia de Havilland, in her film debut, isn’t particularly likeable as Hermia but she contrasts effectively with the placid, very pretty Jean Muir:  her Helena is over-elocuted at first but Muir eventually builds a charming character.  Ross Alexander (who committed suicide only two years later, aged thirty) is Demetrius.   Victor Jory is a striking and impressive Oberon, Anita Louise a rather dreary Titania.   The Theseus (Ian Hunter) is also stronger than his other half Hippolyta (Verree Teasdale).  Along with Rooney’s, the standout performance is Joe E Brown’s:  as Flute and Thisbe he’s the true clown that Cagney tries and largely fails to be.

    20 June 2011

    [1] See note on Diary of a Country Priest.

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