The Cinema
"A Midsummer Night's Dream." At the Adelphi I , SOMETIMES wonder whether film reviewers are taken quite seriously enough. Criticism, of course, may not be quite in our line,. but the production of .4 Midsummer Night's Dream has demonstrated beyond doubt that no one can shake a better tambourine or turn a better table. We arc superb mediums, or is it an intuitive sympathy with the poet which enables a Mr. Luscombe Whyte (to be remembered for his appreciation of Sant Goldwyn's " classic tragedy," The Dark Angel, and to be distinguished from Mr. Pedro de Cordoba who was a Crusader) to tell us that Shakespeare 4.` had he lived now " would have approved of Herr Reinhardt's film version of his play ? " He had a mind which must hava chafed at the limitations of candle-lit, small stages and curtains. He would have conjured up mad woods with twisted trees, peopled with fantasies clothed in visibility." A pregnant sentence, that, straight from the Ouija's board.
Unfortunately the mediums ' differ. Mr: Sidney Carroll tells us with an even greater air of authority that Shakespeare Would not have liked the film. It is his obligation, he says, " as a man of English descent on both sides for generations to try to protect our national poet dramatist from either idolatry or desecration." As I have said, apart from criticism, there is little we filM critics cannot do.
Alas ! I failed to get in touch with Shakespeare (my English descent is less pure than Mr. Carroll's), but I feel quite sure that Anne Hathaway, " had she lived now," would have thought this a very nice film (I am uncertain of the Dark Lady of the Sonnets), She would have liked .the chorus of budding Shirley Temples drifting gauzily up the solid Teutonic moonbeams, and I aril sure she would have liked the Bear. For Herr Reinhardt is nothing if not literal, and when Helena declares, " No, no, I am as ugly as a bear ; For beasts that Meet me run away for fear," we see a big black bear beating a hasty retreat into the blackberry bushes. All the same, I enjoyed this film, perhaps because I have little affection for the play, which seems to me to have been written with a grins determination on Shakespeare's part to earn for once a Universal certificate.
But Herr Reinhardt, lavish and fanciful rather than imaginative, is uncertain of his new medium. Although in his treatment of the Athenian woodland, the silver birches, thick moss, deep–mists and poolS, there are sequences of great beauty. there are others of almost incredible banality. After an impressive scene when Oberon's winged slaves herd Titania's fairies under his black billowing cloak, we watch a last fairy carried off over a slave's shoulder into the night sky. It is very effective as the slave sinks knee deep into the dark, but when the camera with real Teutonic thoroughness follows his gradual disappearance until only a pair of white hands are left twining in the middle of the Milky Way, the audience showed its good sense by laughing.
Much of the production is poised like this on the edge of absurdity because Herr Reinhardt cannot visualise how his ideas will work out on the screen. We are never allowed to forget the stage producer, a stage producer, though, of unlimited resources with an almost limitless stage.. At every passage of dialogue we are back before footlights and the camera is focussed relentlessly on the character who speaks. The freer, more cinematic fairy sequences arc set to Mendelssohn's music, and this is the way Shakespeare's poetry ought surely to be used if it is not to delay the action. It must be treated as music, not as stage dialogue ,tied to the image of the speaker like words issuing from the mouth of characters in a cartoon.
The acting is fresh and vivid for the very reason that it lacks what Mr. Carroll calls " proper Shakespearian diction and bearing." I do not want to be ungrateful, the film is never dull, and the last sequences, when the ,human characters stream up the stairs to bed, and the fairies flood in and fill the palace in their wake, was a lovely and effective visualisation of " the sweet peace," " the glimmering light," " the dead and drowsy fire," GRATIAM GREENE.
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