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

The great filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini once exclaimed that through particular “insistences”—formal, ideological, personal—a director encodes “the temptation to make another film.”¹ The singular strength of Russell Jackson’s much-anticipated book, Shakespeare Films in the Making, is its ability to uncover all the films which, for various reasons, were never made during the making of an unusual cluster of Shakespeare adaptations, beginning with Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) and Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944), and concluding with three adaptations of Romeo and Juliet: the George Cukor-Irving Thalberg production (1936), Renato Castellani’s neorealist adaptation (1954), and, of course, Franco Zeffirelli’s pioneering “flower-child” version of 1968. Divided into three lengthy chapters, Jackson’s study is one of a kind; the rigor of his approach, which is at once historical, formal-aesthetic, and sociopolitical, is nothing short of Herculean, as he uncovers minutiae never before revealed to readers. By the same token, the book would have benefited from either some judicious editing or stronger framing at particular junctures.

As implied by its privileging of “vision” in the subtitle, the thematic preoccupation of the book is dreaming and, more specifically, the dream-“children of an idle brain” (Romeo and Juliet, 1.4.97)² that remain idle—never to be seen on screen—but etched on surfaces ranging from discarded celluloid to dirty cocktail napkins. As we might expect, the dream metaphor works better in some places than in others. For instance, in the context of Reinhardt and Dieterle’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, the connection is obvious; in the book’s concluding chapter, which ends with a note on Zeffirelli’s plan to have Romeo and Juliet culminate in a dream-like montage, the analogy is a bit strained. There is no question, however, that Jackson has a powerful vision for the book’s arc and content; the writing is utterly inspired—as if hypnotized by its material. Appropriately, the book also hypnotizes readers into envisioning their own dreams of the films that might have been, tantalized by what Jackson admittedly refers to as the “more lurid” elements (111) that distinguish the often-risqué scripts from their far more chaste screen realizations. The introduction sets forth the book’s thesis; but what follows is not so much argument driven as densely descriptive, resulting in a narrative of the “processes by which filmmakers conduct the two-way traffic between dreaming and what we take for reality” (1).

Nowhere is this two-way process better demonstrated than in the introduction, where Jackson moves with agility between the early films and their uncanny resonances in recent adaptations, such as Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999) and Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996). But such comparisons belie the often surprisingly circuitous trajectories of influence that the book documents; as Jackson observes, “Influences sometimes flow in unexpected channels” (2). He explains, “Disney’s animators may well have looked to Reinhardt for inspiration in the forest scenes of the studio’s first feature-length animation, Snow White (1937), and the 1935 film seems more akin to the sinister setting of Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves (1984) than to the relatively unthreatening woodland in Michael Hoffman’s 1999 version of the Shakespeare play [A Midsummer Night’s Dream]” (2). Dreaming is also employed as the verb of choice to describe filmmaking as a paradoxical process—at once material and ephemeral, evanescent and industrial—particularly in Hollywood, wherein the “‘vision,’” Jackson notes, “is as much a realisation of the studio’s self-image as of the play’s potential or the director’s or producer’s art—or, for that matter, the imaginings of an Elizabethan playwright” (4). Additionally, “dreaming” takes place within each Shakespeare adaptation, frequently emerging as a vision of an ideal society or as a means of prescribing social behavior beyond the film itself. In...