A Midsummer Night’s Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream – It is curious that the last great flourish of German expressionist film making in its heroic mode is the star-studded 1936 Hollywood extravaganza A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This Shakespeare adaptation captures elements of Max Reinhardt’s famous Hollywood bowl production as directed by the German émigré William Dieterle. Mickey Rooney plays Puck, Dick Powell is Lysander, one of the nearly identical and moony lovers, Joe E. Brown is one of the “rude mechanicals” and Jimmy Cagney takes the part of Bottom. Olivia de Havilland has a role and I’m certain that all of the principal parts are played by famous Hollywood actors of the day – but time has eroded the names and fame of most of them (for instance Arthur Treacher who appears in the film is known to me primarily as the grave spokesman for a chain of Fish ‘n Chips restaurants now defunct.) The picture is spectacularly beautiful and surprisingly effective, one of the best of all Shakespeare adaptations and, certainly, one of the most persistently visual in its approach. The opening scenes in Athens are stately and sun-lit featuring compositions and costumes that mimic Tiepolo. The woods surrounding Athens are suitably dark and filled with strange creatures. In the late 60’s Peter Hall, I think, directed a version of the play that was famous for adopting Jan Kott’s then-fashionable ideas about Shakespeare to the stage. The film, which featured an entirely nude and luscious Diana Rigg as Titania, was shown on PBS and thought to be very avant-garde. Hall emphasized the strangeness of the play and its pagan undertones – the wildness and arbitrary passions of the supernaturals. Dieterle’s film is, if anything, even more extreme in this regard – Puck as played by Mickey Rooney is a feral naked youth, a cross between a coyote and a goat, who salutes the characters with weird howling sounds. The Fairy King is an uncanny specter, the embodiment of night, wearing a crown like a stag’s horns and riding a black horse through misty meadows and colonnades of huge trees – much of the staging looks like scenes from Lang’s Siegfried. There are splendid ballet scenes, impressive special effects, and a glittering chiaroscuro – the film scintillates with strange highlights, fogs of dew in raking light and cobwebs like bridal veils. The scene in which the fairies dance just before the break of dawn is one of the most imposing scenes filmed in the thirties, an invocation of night and moonlight staged in with spectacular assurance and, in its portrayal of the primordial war between light and dark, fully the equal of some of the greatest scenes in Murnau’s Faust.