by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Warner Bros.’ 1935 filmization of Shakespeare’s
play, which was co-directed by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle and based on
a very famous stage production Reinhardt had directed in Germany in the 1920’s
before the Nazis took over and forced him to flee the country. Reinhardt,
working at the Deutsches Theatre in Berlin and the Theatre in der Josefstadt in
Vienna, staged A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a legendary Berlin production in the mid-1920’s that used a large
stage, elaborate special effects and the incidental music Felix Mendelssohn had
composed a century earlier. The Berlin production used a German translation of
the play by August W. Schlegel (in German literary history Schlegel’s
translations of Shakespeare are considered masterpieces in their own right and
are still often the versions used when Shakespeare is staged in German-speaking
countries), but apparently Reinhardt took the production to the U.S. as early as
1927 and staged it in Shakespeare’s original English. Reinhardt settled in the
U.S. in 1935 (though he traveled back to Austria and continued to work there
until the Nazi Anschluss in 1938)
and started staging his massive productions in the L.A. area — including The
Eternal Road, a collaboration with fellow
anti-Nazi refugee Kurt Weill that was performed in the Hollywood Bowl (the only
place in town that had a stage big enough for it), got bad reviews denouncing
it as an overblown spectacle and has also suffered from Weill’s spectacularly
wrong call that the Jews had survived pogroms before and they’d be able to survive the Nazi
oppression as well. (Still, some of The Eternal Road was finally recorded by the Naxos label a few years
ago and it turned out to be a fascinating, if often pretentious,
musico-dramatic piece about the history of anti-Semitic oppression.) Warner
Bros. signed Reinhardt, who’d made a couple of poorly received silent films in
Germany in the early “teens,” to reproduce his famous A Midsummer
Night’s Dream production on film, and
offered him the pick of their contract cast list — though Reinhardt had to
fight Jack Warner to get to cast James Cagney as Bottom (Warner wanted him to
use Guy Kibbee, probably thinking of all the money he was losing by having
Cagney cavort on Reinhardt’s and art director Anton Grot’s massive fairyland
sets instead of having him crank out a few cheap, quick and lucrative crime
dramas) and Bette Davis got aced out of the female lead, Hermia, by her good
friend Olivia de Havilland (whose last name was spelled with only one “l” in
the credits).
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s most charming plays but also one of his least
well structured; the three interlocking plots — the battle of Athenian prince
Theseus (Ian Hunter, a British actor who delivers the Shakespearean dialogue
idiomatically enough but seems so hammy he practically glues himself to the
lens) to get the bride he’s forced to marry him, Amazonian queen Hippolyta (the
Athenians have just defeated the Amazons in battle and she’s his prize for the
victory), to love him; the interlocking romantic intrigues of Lysander (Dick
Powell, pushing his naturally high voice even higher than usual and responding
to the challenge of acting Shakespeare by speaking as if he sucked on helium
before each take), Hermia (Olivia de Havilland), Demetrius (real-life Bisexual
Ross Alexander, who looks so queeny in this one you wonder why he and Powell
don’t pair up and leave the women alone) and Helena (Jean Muir); and the
intrigue among the fairies and also the proletarian players who are anxious to
win the lifetime pension offered to anyone who performs a show at Theseus’ and
Hippolyta’s wedding — don’t really reflect each other that well and often get
in each other’s way. A Midsummer Night’s Dream was part of Jack Warner’s campaign to get the rest
of Hollywood to accept Warner Bros. as a full-fledged major studio, the equal
of MGM and Paramount, instead of just that nice little company in Burbank that
made gangster movies and musicals. First, in 1934, he’d green-lighted Madame
DuBarry, William Dieterle’s remake of an
Ernst Lubitsch German silent about French King Louis XV’s famous consort, which
flopped at the box office largely because it got caught in the crossfire over
the Legion of Decency and its successful campaign to end the relative sexual
freedom of American films during the so-called “pre-Code” era — though it
turned out to be a marvelous film, vividly acted by Dolores Del Rio as DuBarry
and stylishly directed by Dieterle. Then in 1935 Warner green-lighted A
Midsummer Night’s Dream and ended up with a
visually stunning tour de force,
an overwhelming movie in both the good and not-so-good senses of the term,
which flopped at the box office but fulfilled its purpose in giving the studio
prestige. The next year Warners grabbed two of the biggest story properties
around, Hervey Allen’s novel Anthony Adverse and Marc Connelly’s play The Green
Pastures, filmed them and ended up with two
blockbuster hits.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (the movie) is an astonishing spectacle, variably
acted — of all the cast members only Olivia de Havilland is comfortable enough
with the Shakespearean language not only to speak it effectively but use it to convey emotion. James Cagney as Bottom and
Mickey Rooney as Puck (who according to the American Film Institute
Catalog broke his leg shortly before
filming and had to act much of his part riding around on a tricycle to get
around the big sets as fast as Reinhardt wanted him to) largely use Shakespeare
as an excuse to overact — though both of them have surprisingly strong moments,
Cagney when he loses his donkey’s head (an immobile mask, though his
man-to-donkey and donkey-to-man transformations are accomplished through double
exposures, much the way Lon Chaney, Jr. changed into the Wolf-Man) and realizes
he’s once again a normal human; and Rooney when he delivers the play’s
epilogue. Where the film scores is in the incredible visual atmosphere,
especially in the fairyland woods; the special effects — people magically
appearing and disappearing, flying through the woods, and transforming — are
state-of-the-art for 1935 and still
enormously impressive; and, oddly for a Shakespeare movie, the strongest
moments are when the characters are not talking, but moving with dancers’ grace (Reinhardt actually did cast dancers in most of the non-speaking roles)
through the big forest sets to the themes from Mendelssohn’s score as arranged
by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (in his first job in films). A Midsummer
Night’s Dream was nominated for three
Academy Awards — Best Picture, Best Assistant Director (Sherry Shounds) and
Best Editing (Ralph Dawson) — and won two: Dawson for editing and Hal Mohr for
cinematography. This was the last of two years in the mid-1930’s in which the
Academy allowed write-in votes; Mohr — who had replaced Ernest Haller early in
the production, told Reinhardt that the big forest set was unfilmable as it
stood, and had some of the artificial trees taken out and metal reflectors put
in throughout the set, which gave the film the remarkable sparkledust effect
that’s one of the biggest things anyone remembers about it — had, depending on
which account you read, either tried to settle a cinematographers’ strike or
scabbed on it. As a result, his fellow cinematographers didn’t like him and
denied him the nomination he richly deserved — but the Academy voters responded
and gave him the award on a write-in, whereupon the Academy eliminated the
write-in option and thereby made Mohr the only write-in Oscar winner in history.
The atmospherics
are a good deal more compelling than the plot(s), in which the fairies — led by
King Oberon (Victor Jory, oddly made up with a crown with a lot of branches
sticking out above it) and Queen Titania (Anita Louise), who are feuding — try
to use love spells to get the recalcitrant humans properly paired off, and of
course screw it up: their spells make Lysander (briefly) abandon Hermia (whom
he’s been forbidden to marry by her father Egeus, played by Grant Mitchell) for
Helena, while Demetrius, who’s the man Egeus has chosen to be his daughter’s
husband, also falls for Helena (who’s had an unrequited crush on him from the
start), and also make Queen Titania fall for the donkey-headed Bottom — when
the two men in her life confront each other I joked, “Oh, great. She gets to
choose between a donkey and a tree.” The scenes with the proletarians — Bottom
the weaver, Quince the carpenter (Frank McHugh), Snug the joiner (Dewey
Robinson), Flute the bellows-mender (Joe E. Brown), Snout the tinker (a
marvelous Hugh Herbert, who for once makes his “woo-woo” act work in context),
and Starveling the tailor (Otis Harlan) — are the closest this film comes to
true Warner Bros. territory, and as they enact the “tragical comedy” of Pyramus
and Thisbe (which comes off as a Shakespearean self-parody of Romeo
and Juliet!) seeing James Cagney cruising
Joe E. Brown in drag is great fun and an interesting premonition of Brown’s
later marriage proposal to Jack Lemmon at the end of Some Like It
Hot. I’m not sure what to make of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream as a totality; some
of it is marvelous, some of it maddening, and I suspect Reinhardt’s three-ring
circus production style is responsible for that. Other directors who’ve tackled
A Midsummer Night’s Dream have
tried to smooth out the discontinuities in Shakespeare’s script; Reinhardt
seems to have reveled in them, delighting in the crashing gear-shifts in tone
and clearly more interested in the fairy scenes, where he could be abstract and
throw the entire armamentarium of available special effects in the mix, than in
the relatively staid and dull romantic intrigues at the Athenian court.
It’s
not the sort of film you want to see every day, and one can readily understand
why it was a money-loser in 1935, yet it’s also audaciously imaginative in its
use of sets, costumes, movement and music; Charles argued that Mendelssohn
seems to have pioneered some of the techniques later associated with Wagner,
though I suspect Erich Wolfgang Korngold made Mendelssohn’s music sound more
“Wagnerian” than it did originally, picking the most famous parts of
Mendelssohn’s score (the Overture, Scherzo, Nocturne, choral finale and the big
wedding march) and chopping the themes up to serve as Leitmotifs. (Still, Wagner was clearly influenced both by
Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, even though they were the two Jewish composers he
singled out for abuse in his infamous essay “Judaism in Music.”) It’s also not
clear whether Leo F. Forbstein, credited as usual in Warners’ films of the time
as “musical director,” or Korngold himself conducted — though my money is on
Korngold as conductor; the music is not only superbly adapted but richly shaped
and phrased in a way I can’t believe a journeyman conductor like Forbstein
could have accomplished. The following year MGM filmed Romeo and
Juliet (a far better constructed play) in a
more straightforward adaptation that holds up as a better movie but isn’t
anywhere nearly as creative (and Herbert Stothart’s adaptation of Tchaikovsky
for the score is hardly in the same league as Korngold’s adaptation of
Mendelssohn here!). Incidentally the opening credits for A Midsummer
Night’s Dream not only indicate the
prestige nature of the project (instead of just saying “Warner Bros. Pictures
present” they say “Warner Bros. Pictures have the honor to present”) but
co-credit the direction to Reinhardt and fellow German expat (“ex-patriot,”
he’s called in the American Film Institute Catalog, in one of their wilder typos) William Dieterle, and
I had assumed that Jack Warner had given Reinhardt a co-director who was more
experienced both with English and with movies — but according to the AFI
Catalog, Dieterle filled in for a week or
so when a French producer obtained an injunction against Reinhardt forbidding
him to work for anyone else, and Warner put Dieterle on the project so shooting
could continue until Reinhardt won his freedom from his French contract in
court.
