Shakespeare the Illusionist. Neil Forsyth

directed by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle, which not only makes use of some remaining shards of Shakespeare’s words but also includes Eric Korngold’s arrangement of Mendelssohn’s Overture plus incidental music.⁹ Instead this film is, or has become, in the words of Trevor Griffith, “the nearest thing we have to a film of the old spectacular tradition of staging the play”¹⁰—a record of how the nineteenth-century audience loved elaborate stage effects, including flying fairies and magic puffs of smoke or explosions, Mendelssohn’s music, lengthy ballets, and live animals. At one point Puck appears riding “what can only be described as a Shetland unicorn.”¹¹ The film won two Oscars, for best film editing (Ralph Dawson) and best cinematography (Hal Mohr), the latter by popular vote, not as an official nomination. Students laugh in mixed embarrassment and relief when they see the film (because surely no one could expect them to take this seriously: it’s not Shakespeare, after all), and Sir John Gielgud said watching it was akin to having surgery. This may be unfair, given the interest the film has for historians of the genre, but it is understandable and makes the lyrical generosity of some critics (stating, for example, that “the overall effect is exhilarating”) seem a trifle ridiculous.¹² Today’s youths, schooled in the films of Stephen King and Neil Jordan, are unlikely to agree with G. Wilson Knight, who wrote in 1936 of “the nightmarish fearsomeness of the wood and its wild beasts.”¹³

      Reinhardt, who had been directing the play in Germany for some thirty years (and followed his countryman Ludwig Tieck’s Potsdam production of 1834 in using the Mendelssohn music), said he thought of it as “a plea for the glorious release to be found in sheer fantasy”—which makes it all the more important that he shared the direction with Dieterle, whose darker view of the play and especially the fairies gives the film its slightly creepy watchability (Reinhardt’s English was apparently still limited, such that he had to communicate via his German colleague). The cheerful cruelty of Mickey Rooney’s celebrated and almost naked Puck may be Dieterle’s design,¹⁴ and although the child often crows a little too loudly and emphatically, it does not take much to imagine yourself into his power, and so helpless with fear. Witness in particular the only moving bits of James Cagney’s unlikely Bottom: when he is first made to see himself as an ass (which removes the point of his joke about the others making an ass of him), he weeps against the tree, and then again, when he is restored to himself, his whole body trembles. This film’s Puck in his first scene emerges slowly from the forest leaves in which he is sleeping and with which he is at some level, the image suggests, identical. He is less threatening perhaps when he imitates the lovers, leads them astray, and puts them to sleep, but without him and his humor those scenes would be unbearable for the dreadful acting: the lovers behave like sulky and spoilt children—except for Olivia de Havilland, who is melodrama incarnate as she wakes from her snake dream (2.2.150) and manages to lose all its suggestive power. The final act is framed by Puck’s mischievous laugh, as he wakes in the forest, first pretends to be frightened, then sees himself in the stream and lets out a peal of laughter, which the soundtrack transforms bizarrely into Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.” He then reappears at the end, when the fairies invade the Athenian space, bringing their sparkling screen with them. And his childish cackle echoes and sums up the other slightly hysterical and often unfunny laughter of the film.

      This would have been a very different film if Reinhardt had been able to follow his first ideas. Russell Jackson’s research has shown that Reinhardt initially hoped to cast Charlie Chaplin as Bottom, Greta Garbo as Titania, Gary Cooper as Lysander, Clark Gable as Demetrius, Joan Crawford as Helena, Myrna Loy as Hermia, and, best of all, Fred Astaire as Puck. Nonetheless, many established stars agreed to join the fun. An early script draft for the film also included a role for Bottom’s wife, subsequently abandoned by Reinhardt only to be resurrected more than sixty years later by Michael Hoffman’s film of the play in 1999.¹⁵

      What links Reinhardt’s film to its silent forebears is mostly the tradition of stage magic. Elaborate sets and sudden irruptions from the wings, chemical flashes of light, and swirling fog had long been part of the stage tradition, as explored by Jack Jorgens and Trevor Griffith. But whereas the films made in the immediate wake of Méliès’s inventions were full of trucage, this film returns for the most part to the staged magic of the nineteenth century. The balletic fairies shimmer distantly through the trees, as they could have done on stage through gauze, but they are shot in soft focus and so gain an extra layer of shimmer. Oberon in particular is shot frequently in medium or close-up through sparkling screens or sheets of glass, and he wears a bizarre set of antlers on his head from which light gauze drapes as if he were trying out for the part of the Green Man but inadvertently walked into a spider’s web. The sudden cuts to more threatening images like the occasional goblins, however, are probably more effective on film than on stage.

      The transformation scenes themselves, of course, are done with the latest resources of film—Méliès-style stop-action shots updated by fades—now in the service of Puck’s potent magic. As Puck mimes the features of an ass, Bottom’s head (and only his head—he keeps his clothes on) is transformed before our eyes. And just for a moment there is the suggestion that he is becoming not an ass but a werewolf—an idea that is surely present just beneath the surface of the play and is often activated by the less benign directors, as it was in Adrian Noble’s immensely successful 1994 Stratford production (and 1996 film).¹⁶ Puck suddenly becomes on-screen the hound and the hog he says he is in act 3, scene 1 (lines 103–6), which was already in the play-text an example of realized metaphor and by then could be shown on film. Fortunately, the directors did not go in for too much of this silliness. In Puck’s narration about the Indian Prince, for example, the screen is free of optical effects until Titania appears floating down a shaft of moonlight. In general the film manages to suggest the iridescent unreality of the world the characters enter in the studio-set forest, even if to our contemporary eye the Athens imagined by Hollywood smacks even more of the fantasy grandiose, like Mankiewicz’s Rome for the Brando Julius Caesar, and even more like William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon Castle, so brilliantly parodied as Xanadu in Citizen Kane.

      PETER HALL’S RSC DREAM

      Peter Hall’s 1968 Dream, a version of his Royal Shakespeare Company stage production, makes a fine contrast with the Reinhardt film. The balance of nature has been upset by the quarrelling fairies. “It is not a pretty, balletic affair, but erotic, physical, down-to-earth,” as Hall said. Hence his decision to film in a wet out-of-doors Warwickshire autumn.¹⁷ Although he kept all but six lines of the play, the visual impact of the turmoil in the woods “often speak[s] even more powerfully than the text.”¹⁸ Yet this film too has visibly dated. The 1960s miniskirts and long boots of Diana Rigg and Helen Mirren (Helena and Hermia) look quaintly fetching now in the midst of the muddy darkness of the forest. The fairies are flower children, and Judy Dench (Titania) is virtually naked. But the magic is done with taste and firmness of touch. There is no instantly transformed head: rather, Bottom (Paul Rogers, reprising the role from the earliest surviving television adaptation [BBC, 1958]) walks onto the set with his new head, and we see him just as the hempen homespuns do. Titania’s smile becomes menacing as Bottom tries to find his way out of the wood and out of her reach, and she is made to appear suddenly in his path, exactly where he is not expecting her. A daring touch at the time is the way Bottom’s soliloquy is delivered to the camera. Lights accompany the fairies (the flower children) in their night adventures, but they do not flash or sparkle like a kitschy Christmas. Once again, Puck is the primary focus. His appearances, like those of the other fairies, are done by jump cuts and use Méliès-style surimpression: he is usually in close-up, suddenly there with us on the screen, often occupying it entirely with his intelligent and eager face. He is played throughout by the excellent Ian Holm with a convincingly amoral naughtiness, and he has splendid fun with the leaden Demetrius (Michael Jayston) and Lysander (David Warner). At one point he blows forth a cloud of steam that envelops Demetrius, and a cut reveals the two men walking close by but away from each other in the resulting mist. Though the play ends with that marvelous celebration of theatre that is the Pyramus and Thisbe of the rude mechanicals, the film ends by a celebration of itself: it brings together all the Méliès-based techniques in the short but delightful fairy sequence, once again dominated by Puck, who appears first in the closest close-up of all, his face filling