Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

AutCuddly Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Abbigail Bush what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Eric Stevenson Having watched all these crappy movies for Nostalgia Critic Month, I'm finally going to be watching mostly nothing but classic for Shakespeare Month! I have no idea if this is the first feature length Shakespeare adaptation ever made, but it certainly seems like it. I admit to being unfamiliar with "A Midsummer Night's Dream", at least in comparison to other of Shakespeare's works. I do remember that it features this creature or spirit who makes people fall in love while they're asleep. I had no idea there were all these other weird things going on. There's a subplot where this one guy has the head of a donkey! They actually use the term "ass" which I guess in this context would be allowable in a 1930's film. The modern meaning probably wasn't mainstream then. We even get this story about people who are actually putting on a play themselves. Yep, this is basically a play about a play! Puck was the most memorable character and it's weird how Leonard Maltin found him annoying. I just loved the costumes and visuals in this. It holds up after close to a century! The sets just look great and it's a wonderful early Shakespeare adaptation. ***1/2

charlesem The spirit that animates this version of the play is not that of William Shakespeare but Felix Mendelssohn. Shakespeare's text has been trimmed to a nubbin and hashed up by the "arrangers," Charles Kenyon and Mary C. McCall Jr., and it's gabbled by the all-star cast. Strangely, Olivia de Havilland as Hermia and Mickey Rooney as Puck are the worst offenders, and they are the only members of the cast of Max Reinhardt's celebrated 1934 Hollywood Bowl production, which inspired Warner Bros. to film the play, who made it into the movie. De Havilland delivers her lines with heavy emphasis on seemingly random words and with odd pauses, while Rooney punctuates every line with giggles, chortles, and shrieks that affect some viewers like fingernails on a chalkboard. Nobody in the cast seems to be aware that they're speaking verse. Fortunately, the decision was made to use the Mendelssohn overture and incidental music (along with snippets of other works by Mendelssohn), and to have it orchestrated by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. The result is an opulently balletic version of the play, taking advantage of what can be done in movies that can't be done on stage. Is it good? Maybe not, but it's much more fun than the stodgily reverent version of Romeo and Juliet (George Cukor, 1936) that MGM came up with the following year. Casting James Cagney as Bottom/Pyramus and Joe E. Brown as Flute/Thisby was a masterstroke, and if they had been directed by someone with a surer sense of American comic idiom than Reinhardt, the Viennese refugee from Hitler who spoke very little English (Dieterle acted as interpreter), the results would have been classic -- as it is, they're just bumptious fun. Much of the movie is sheer camp, reminiscent of the twee illustrations for children's books in the early 20th century. But there is a spectacular moment in the film when Oberon (Victor Jory) gathers the fairies, gnomes, and bat- winged sprites to depart, under a billowing black train that sometimes resembles smoke. The cinematography by Hal Mohr won the only write-in Oscar ever granted by the Academy. (charlesmatthews.blogspot.com)

jakob13 A refurbished 'Midsummer Night's Dream' is now available. A 1935 rendering of Shakespeare's play with the 16 year old Mendelssohn's masterpiece as background music. Austrian born theater impresario Max Reinhardt co directed it with German-born William Dieterle a Hollywood filmmaker. The influence of German expression is noticeable, but it takes nothing away from the Bard's fairy tale. A parade of Hollywood stars and character actors parade across the screen with Shakespeare's meter and line as dialogue. Romantic leads, song and dance men, comedians and what ever you would find in a Studio's rooster of the Golden Age of Hollywood Studios. Victor Jory, Tina Louise, Ross Alexander, the young Olivia DeHavilland (still alive at 97), Dick Powell, Jane Muir. Then there the eternal laughter of Hugh Herbert as Snout, the plastic faced Joe E. Brown as Flute, the eternal harassed backstage guy in musicals Frank McHugh as Quince and a trim Arthur Treacher without much to say. The ensemble turns in a stellar performance. But it's the 13 year old Mickey Rooney as Puck that is a wondrous delight as his name implies. His performance is almost matched by Jimmy Cagney as Bottom the weaver who is transformed in an ass. And then there is the eternal play of night and day, the aerie lightness of the fairies and the dark brooding of the Teutonic nights of Oberon. This is a film that 80 years on doesn't creak, but is a surprise to the unsuspecting eye that comes up this version of 'Midsummer Night's Dream'. The play has been brought to the screen many times over, but no version has and can match the Reinhardt production, a savvy fixture of theater and cinema. It should and deserves to be seen!

dougdoepke It's a maddening movie, hard to get a handle on. On one hand, there's the Anglo world's leading playwrite, Shakespeare, along with the glorious strains of Mendelsohn; on another, there're a bunch of Hollywood contract players who made their bones as gangsters or low comedy relief. Add a wild card of downright ethereal imagination, and you've got a movie like no other. I can see why the two hours and more failed at the box-office. After all, how many movie-goers want Shakespeare with their gun-toting Cagney, even if he does well. Then too, two hours of poetic dialog, along with goofy mugging, can strain more than just the backside. Frankly, I fast-forwarded through some of the mugging passages. But what kept me going were those ethereal passages, especially the early ones. Now ordinarily, I'm not too much on fairies, nymphs or wood sprites. But the sight of those wispy creatures snaking up beams of light and into some nether world is darn near as good as Randolph Scott striding down a lawless street. In fact, it may be even better, certainly more exotic. Whoever staged those unearthly scenes deserves an Oscar of superlative design. Anyhow, I'm in no position to really judge the film since I wouldn't know Shakespeare from Albert Einstein. But I do know that visual imagination doesn't come anymore striking. And if the beams preview a stairway to the Pearly Gates, then count me in, even if I have to put down my beer bottle.