|
|
A Midsummer Night's Dream |
 |
A Midsummer Night's Dream
|
by MGM (Video & DVD)
Sales Rank: 10739
Price: $19.98
|
|
|
James Cagney and Mickey Rooney romping in a Shakespearian fairyland? This could only be <I>A Midsummer Night's Dream</I>, Warner Bros.' 1935 attempt at classing up the proletarian studio. The legendary German stage director Max Reinhardt had produced the play at the Hollywood Bowl to enchanted, sold-out audiences, and Warners decided to hand Reinhardt the keys to the studio (along with fellow Germans William Dieterle, co-director, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who adapted Mendelssohn's music). Reinhardt created an eye-popping phantasmagoria, a movie laced with sparkling sequins, flying fairies, and moon-kissed forests. As for the words, Reinhardt had a collection of Warners studio players, notably James Cagney as Bottom, whose playing of "Pyramus and Thisby" with Joe E. Brown is perhaps the movie's comic high point. The other actors are decidedly varied, and they tend to be overwhelmed by the production design. Not so Mickey Rooney, whose performance as Puck is a feral, antic act of imagination (he was 14 during filming); picture a boy raised by wolves who somehow memorized Shakespeare. His Puck growls and screams and mocks the drama of the other characters, a little postmodern imp before his time. (Critic David Thomson called this Puck "truly inhuman, one of the cinema's most arresting pieces of magic"). The rest of the movie comes to earth with some regularity, but it's a one-of-a-kind production, and a reminder of the lavish, unreal possibilities within a movie studio. <I>--Robert Horton</I>
Viewer Reviews
Now I know why this movie failed in the theaters. First of all - Shakespeare's plays with their Elizabethan English are too hard to understand by semi literate American audiences, especially of the 1930's. Second of all, there were way too many special effects, music, and dance numbers right out of Vaudeville. Thirdly, some of the fairies looked like something out of a nightmare of Dante's Inferno, appearing quite grotesque. Fourth, the adults and children were so scantily clad I imagine the Catholic Church and other churches had fits when it was released. Fifth and finally, there was not enough of the Bard for the play to make sense. It came off as Shakespeare collides with Ziegfeld's follies. The acting to say the least was over done, exaggerated, and hammy at best. To borrow a title from another Shakespeare play, it was really MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. I am grateful the director did not succeed in making another movie about one of the Bard's plays.
Back To Top
|
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Available from Amazon
|
|
NOTICE: All product prices, availability, and specifications
are subject to verification by their respective retailers.
Copyright © 2009, Dominant Systems Corporation
info@HowlingVideo.com
Privacy Policy
Last Modified : 1-8-2009
|
