Shakespeare Films in the Making: Vision, Production and Reception (review)

Russell Jackson’s bold and engaging Shakespeare Films in the Making takes the study of Shakespeare on film in a rewarding new direction. The great explosion of work focusing on Shakespeare on film in the past two decades has been characterized by close reading, performance and film theory, auteur analysis, feminist and psychoanalytic approaches, and cultural and genre studies. Jackson’s work takes us to university libraries, Hollywood studio archives, the British Film Institute, and the Folger Shakespeare Library in search of documents that detail the conception, execution, and reception of the Shakespeare films his study scrutinizes.

Jackson traces the development of five major Shakespeare films, released from 1935 to 1968, through the careful examination of studio memos, production outlines, design concepts, screenplays, shooting scripts, press packets, publicity campaigns, and initial newspaper and magazine reviews. Jackson, who has served as the textual advisor for all of Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespeare films, has firsthand knowledge of the ways films develop and emerge from screenplay treatments, soundstage and location shooting, and from their final construction in the editing room. He applies that knowledge to his role of film scholar and historian as he uncovers and sifts through the variety of material artifacts that surround the making and release of the five films his study illuminates: the 1935 Warner Brothers A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944), and three films of Romeo and Juliet directed by George Cukor (1936), Renato Castellani (1954), and Franco Zeffirelli (1968).

One of the first gems his research unearths is that Max Reinhardt had initially dreamed of casting 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 for the film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream he eventually made with William Dieterle. Jackson also puts to rest the misinformation begun by the underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger himself (perpetuated by many including this reviewer) that Anger played the Little Indian Boy in the Warner Brothers Dream by definitively revealing that the part was played by Sheila Brown. An early script draft for the film also included a role for Bottom’s wife, subsequently abandoned by Reinhardt only to be resurrected over sixty years later in Michael Hoffman’s film of the play in 1999.

Jackson’s research also reveals that the BBC’s Dallas Bower, the producer who first experimented with Shakespeare on television in the late 1930s, was a moving force behind Olivier’s film of Henry V; Bower’s television adaptation of the play served as the first version of the screenplay. Jackson also explains why Olivier did not employ some of his great English actor contemporaries in the film, as John Gielgud and Edith Evans were under contract to a West End theatrical manager who would not release them and Vivien Leigh was similarly under contract to David O. Selznick, who refused to “loan” his Gone with the Wind star out for the project. All who have written about Olivier’s wonderful film are at pains to place it in the context of World War II and the Allied invasion of France to liberate Europe from Hitler. Jackson, however, goes a step further by placing the film in its cinematic, as well as historical, context by linking it to other films of the period that either inspired elements of Olivier’s treatment of his Shakespearean material or were similarly pitched to support the war effort, including Fire Over England (1937), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), The Sea Hawk (1940), That Hamilton Woman (1941), and Mrs. Miniver (1941).

In the case of the three Romeo and Juliet films, Jackson believes they “endow the Shakespearean source with the cultural aura of the Italian Renaissance and at the same time reverse the process to dignify Verona with Shakespeare” (127). For Jackson each film creates a different fantasy version of the Italian Renaissance which allows...