Midsummer Dream, Midwinter Nightmare: Max Reinhardt and Shakespeare versus the Warner Bros.

What a Dream was Here

The Austrian producer Max Reinhardt was regarded as the greatest theatrical impresario of the age when, in 1934, he brought his latest staging of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream to Los Angeles. For this, his thirteenth production of the play since 1905, Reinhardt transformed the Hollywood Bowl into a fairy realm and gave the movie colony "Shakespeare under the stars," enchanting fifteen thousand patrons nightly for eight nights. As the Bowl's enchantment overflowed to Burbank, home of Warner Bros. Pictures, a first-class motion picture was undertaken, and Shakespeare encountered obstacles of language and culture from which he may never recover.

Max Reinhardt's film adaptation streaked the eyes of 1930s movie audiences, lulling some with delights and filling others with hateful fantasies. Three-quarters of a century on, the modern viewer raises an eyebrow as high art collides headlong with high camp. The movie is a crazy jumble of rococo décor that mashes up pre-Christian Greece, sixteenth-century England, and nineteenth-century children's book illustrations with Beaux-Art architecture, Victorian etchings, and Jazz Age grace notes. There is a dash of Arthur Rackham here, a soupçon of Aubrey Beardsley there. A half-draped nude from Maxfield Parrish nuzzles up to a fairy robe out of Erté. The Warner Bros. stock company declaims the poetry of England's greatest dramatist with the subtlety of a vaudeville patter song, compelled by their Teutonic task masters, ill met by arc light.

Aba Daba Honeymoon: The unlikely mating of Anita Louise and James Cagney. Almost as unlikely was the marriage of Max Reinhardt and Hollywood.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is absolutely bereft of taste, starved for respectability. Nevertheless, there are those who find every blessed, demented frame an utter delight. Looking beyond the movie's social and mercantile implications, American critic Andre Sennwald wrote in 1935,

The special achievement is the ability to recite the complex fable with clarity. If this is no masterpiece, it is a brave and beautiful effort to subdue the most difficult of Shakespeare's works. It has its fun and its haunted beauty.¹

The play's spectral fun originates in pagan traditions. In pre-Christian Europe, June 21, the summer solstice, was a festival day with mystic import. The calendar's longest day and shortest night was met with bonfires and ritual games for courting lovers. It was believed that certain herbs picked that day accrued magical powers. This pagan worldview informs Shakespeare's comedy, which he is believed to have written in 1595.²

Quarrelsome Foursome: Jean Muir, Ross Alexander, Dick Powell, Olivia de Havilland as the enchanted ménage a quatre.

Nature in the wrong: Elemental spirits Oberon (Victor Jory) and Titania (Anita Louise) wage a custody battle over Indian Prince (Sheila Brown).

The play contrasts four sets of lovers whose adventures become entwined. Two of the couples are upper class mortals. Hermia and Lysander are true loves held apart by her father. Hermia's best friend, Helena, pines for Demetrius, but he loathes her and desires Hermia. Hermia despises Demetrius and favors Lysander. These couplings find counterpoint in two royal couples, one earthly and the other ethereal. Theseus and Hippolyta are worldly sovereigns whose union is political, brought about by subjugation, but which Theseus intends to turn to true love. In the fairy world, the elemental nature spirits Oberon and Titania are estranged over bragging rights to a changeling child.

Through magic and folly, mortal and fairy couples become confounded. A troupe of workmen unwittingly stumbles into the melee. Oberon has his agent, the spirit Puck, bewitch one of them into sporting the head of a donkey, and causes Titania to fall in love with the zoomorphic mortal as the mismatched lovers spend the night fatuously pursuing the wrong mates through the forest. As day breaks, Oberon lifts the enchantments and restores order.

Max Reinhardt made his reputation with...