Shakespeare Meets the Warner Brothers: Reinhardt and Dieterle’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935)

Abstract

Of all the films derived from Shakespeare the Warner Brothers’ transformation of Max Reinhardt’s 1930s theatrical versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, culminating in the 1934 Hollywood Bowl production, seems to me the most neglected, its fascinations obscured by a critical tradition dominated by two overriding constraints. So, on the one hand, the principle endemic to the genre ‘Shakespeare film’ enforces evaluation through a (usually rigidly conceived) fidelity to the parent text. On the other, there is what is (mostly negatively) thought of as this film’s particular problematic, its unlikely combination of high and popular art, especially its use of actors like James Cagney and Mickey Rooney, which sets it apart. (George Cukor’s contemporaneous Romeo and Juliet at MGM used Hollywood stars — Howard, Shearer and John Barrymore — but ones with higher cultural connotations; and only one minor casting, Andy Devine’s, is in the Warner mould.)

“Dora’, she said, ‘why do they call it a masterpiece of kitsch?”

Angela Carter, Wise Children