Hard-working Elizabethan citizens needed a vacation just as much a we do. Probably more, in fact. So they were particularly happy to troop into the Globe Theatre in the year 1596 to find themselves transported away from the narrow London streets into fairyland, where lords and ladies, kings and queens, unlettered artisans, and all manner of sprites and gnomes disport themselves in zany romantic mix-ups, trading spells, pratfalls, and immortal poetry.
That magical play, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, has remained one of the Bard’s most popular over the centuries. You don’t need to know anything about history or politics or myth to understand the plot, which is quite simple, relying on one of comedy’s basic ploys, mistaken identity.
The scene opens in mythical Athens, where we see the plot set in motion as two young people, Hermia and Lysander are refused permission to marry by her obstinate father. They decide to run away together through the nearby forest after dark. They set up a meeting-place.
Cue the fairies, and a hostile meet up between their King, Oberon, and their Queen, Titania, who are bickering over custody of a princely child. As the two powerful spirits argue, the wood fills with supernatural beings of all kinds, singing, dancing, playing unearthly music.
At the same time, a group of Athenian workingmen have gathered in the woods to rehearse a play they hope to put on to celebrate the upcoming wedding of Theseus, the ruler of Athens. These three groups collide, leading to a night of chaos, befuddlement and jests that audiences have enjoyed for centuries.
When Viennese stage director Max Reinhardt arrived in California to stage a production A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Hollywood Bowl, he was one of the most famous theatrical artists in the world, known for his innovative staging of international classics, including a great deal of Shakespeare. The Hollywood Bowl was a new, modern amphitheater, built in a beautiful outdoor setting within easy reach of the city. The production was a huge success with audiences and critics. In a surprising move, Warner Brothers, the studio that had found success in gangster films and musicals, swooped in to hire Reinhardt to make a big-budget, all star movie based on the production.
To me, the 1935 Warner Brothers film of Max Reinhardt’s concept of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is still the best filming of a Shakespeare play. I’m fond of Olivier’s Henry 5th, and Branagh’s Henry 5th, and Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing, Mankiewicz’ Julius Caesar, Welles’ Chimes at Midnight, and many more. But Max Reinhardt, the great German stage director, who didn’t even speak much English, was able to convey what Shakespeare meant this play to be more naturally, with greater ease, than anyone else. His lords and ladies are grand, his King and Queen of the Fairies wondrously magical, and his fairy horde seems made of starlight, exactly as described.
But where Shakespeare’s patrons at the Globe Theatre needed to use their imaginations to see the fairies descend to earth on a moonbeam, in Reinhardt’s version we see just that. This must be one of the loveliest black-and-white movies ever made. The production design is strikingly original, with glittering, diamond-like fairy dust set against black velvet skies and the deep shadowy woods. The followers of the Titania, the fairy queen, are costumed in what looks like sparkling moss, and adorned with flowers. The night-bringing followers of Oberon, the fairy king, peer from the darkness provided by his cloak of night.
The film’s impact is made much more profound because of the beautiful music; the musical score is perhaps the first truly great one, and was tremendously influential in Hollywood. It was adapted from Felix Mendelssohn’s 1826 incidental music for the play by the great Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Korngold, an Austrian Jew already famous for his modern classical works, was asked by Max Reinhardt, with whom he had worked on many stage productions, to leave Germany and come to Hollywood to work with him on film projects. With a somewhat heavy heart, in 1934 Korngold decided that it was truly time to leave his homeland, and arrived in California wondering what was going to become of him.
This was Korngold’s first score, and the prestige of the production allowed him as much time as he needed to create a marvelous piece of music, thoroughly integrated into the story. It is, of course, an adaptation, not original music. But the next decade would show that Korngold was ready to compose his own equally important work.
Topping it all off is the wonderful cast. We tend to forget that the everyday working actors in classic Hollywood were often very experienced stage performers; the tradition of repertory theatrical companies criss-crossing the country was still active through the 1920’s. The increasingly popular movies that replaced it also offered work to hundreds of seasoned thespians.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream benefits hugely from these experts. First, the humans — Ian Hunter and Verree Teasdale, as the noble rulers Theseus and Hippolyta, glamorous and mighty, are both perfectly at home with Shakespearean language. The mixed up love quadrangle of ingenues and swains are just what they should be. Dick Powell, as Lysander, was known to be unhappy with his performance, saying it wasn’t the kind of thing he was good at. But Lysander isn’t a stalwart hero; he’s a callow youth, and Powell is fine. So is the lamented (because of his early death) Ross Alexander as Demetrius. The two young men are supposed to be silly, and they are. So are the two girls, the very young Olivia de Haviland as Hermia and Jean Muir as Helena.
Though they are silly, their thoughts and reactions are entirely understandable. I wonder — and there’s no way to tell — whether it was Reinhardt communicating somehow, even without much English, or his dialog director, William Dieterle, a fellow German who had emigrated to Hollywood in 1930, who coached these actors, some of whom were very young indeed. But every performance, from the longest role to the tiniest bit part, is grounded in perfectly coherent motive.
The fairies are truly inhuman, looking on the mortals they come across with a sort of puzzled interest; they are ruled by the shimmering beauty of Titania (Anita Louise) and the starry midnight authority of Oberon (Victor Jory). Light as thistledown or winged like bats, they gambol and flutter across the countryside. The supernatural character we get to know best, of course, is Puck, Oberon’s henchman, in a brilliant turn by 15 year old Mickey Rooney; Puck is a prankster who will do anything for a laugh at the humans’ expense. If Rooney had never done anything else, he would be famous for this performance.
Miraculously, the comic interludes, so often a stumbling block in Shakespeare — after all, we are dealing with 400 year old humor — are actually funny. In fact they’re extremely funny. The reason for this is easy to see; the roles of the “rude mechanicals,” or ordinary workmen, are played by a stellar collection of clowns. These include Frank McHugh, Dewey Robinson, Arthur Treacher, Hugh Herbert, and Otis Harlan, Joe E. Brown, and James Cagney as Bottom the Weaver, who has a special adventure among the fairies. These are exactly the type of performer these parts were written for.
Shakespeare was known to tailor particular roles for the actors he knew (and even himself). They were tailored for each individual comedian’s particular comic persona, allowing for plenty of stage business and ad-libbing. Since the simple workmen are engaged in putting on a play, there is room for lots of theatrical humor, too, from the egotism of actors, like Bottom, who would really prefer to play all the parts himself, to the inevitable first-night prop disasters which I’m sure were based on real first night disasters at the Globe.
The movie was not a success in 1935, because Warner Brothers promotion accented the “prestige” of the production, rather than the entertainment value. This put off everyday audiences in 1935 (as it probably would today).
But many years later, in November, 1973, Mickey Rooney returned to this play for a very limited run (two weeks!). This time he played Bottom, the Weaver, in another brilliant performance. The theater, The Papermill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey, was packed to the rafters every night. In his curtain speech, Rooney related the many, many times people had expressed to him their love for the Warner Brothers’ film of nearly forty years before.
wonderful article . thank you for all the details on the actors , some of which I would have never been aware had I not read this brief history surrounding the production.
越来越冷了,注意防寒保暖!
Obligations pulled me away from the TCM screening on Dick Powell’s birthdate (Nov 14), but I paused to listen to the overture and recall the many times I first saw this movie on the late show (school night and commercials), and the times since when it has tickled my funny bone and brought out my admiration for the creativity which brought it together.
– Caftan Woman