A Late Summer Night’s Screen

When I was still a grade-schooler, Max Reinhardt’s lavish 1935 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream played on TV frequently. (Television was very different then; due to a shortage of content, old movies got a lot of air time on the independent TV channels.) I watched it multiple times. I had only the slightest clue what was going on. I grasped that Puck was messing with the dreamers by using love potion eye drops and magic, but the details escaped me. It didn’t matter. The whole thing was such a weird spectacle with prancing bats, goblin musicians, flying fairies, and a man with the head of an ass that I watched it anyway. In the years that followed, however, I didn’t bother to revisit it precisely because I had seen it before. But of course in a significant sense I hadn’t – not with an adult’s eyes and ears and with a familiarity with Shakespeare’s written words. With some trepidation last week, I decided to spin up a DVD and take another look.

It is more bizarre than I remembered, not least because of the casting choices from the stable of Warner Brothers, which was a studio best known at the time for gangster movies and comic musicals. Jimmy Cagney as Bottom, Hugh Herbert as Snout, and Joe E. Brown as Flute? Cagney looks completely out of place, though he appropriately plays his character as a ham. Surprisingly, Dick Powell isn’t bad as Lysander even though (or perhaps because) he plays the part the same way he does any other role in a romantic comedy. A very young Olivia de Havilland does well enough as Hermia. 14-year-old Mickey Rooney’s enthusiastically cackling Puck is annoying, but that also works for the character. Several of the other actors put the lignin in wooden, but they are overwhelmed by the ballet-style (I hesitate actually to call it ballet) dances of fairies and woodland creatures to a score by Mendelssohn. The movie starts, by the way, with a 6+ minute overture for no explicable reason. The special effects are impressive and laughably hokey in equal measure.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is complex and freaky enough as written. As the reader likely knows, several subplots intertwine. There are the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta, the forbidden love of Hermia and Lysander, the unrequited love of Helena for Demetrius, the three common laborers who struggle to perform a play about Pyramus and Thisbe, the dispute between fairy royalty Oberon and Titania over her abduction of a comely young boy, and the fairy Puck who causes mischief. It’s no wonder I lost track of the details as a boy.

We are unlikely to see anything like this version attempted again, and perhaps that’s a good thing, but if you can handle Shakespeare on screen at all (I do know people who can’t) this is in my top five of ones you should see. That does not mean it is one of the five best. It isn’t. It only means it is one you should see. I’m glad I finally did…again.