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.
