Cinema: The New Pictures: Oct. 21, 1935

A Midsummer Night's Dream (Warner). A year ago Director Max Reinhardt took his famed stage production of A Midsummer Night's Dream to the Hollywood Bowl. Its reception there impressed upon Cineman Jack Warner a fact long familiar to stage impresarios: although most people may doze through his plays, they will pay well to see William Shakespeare performed. With what the cinema industry immediately hailed as an unparalleled display of courage, optimism, and esthetic vision, Producer Warner thereupon started work.

The result is the first authentic effort in the history of cinema to produce a Shakespearean drama. Manufactured at a cost of $1,500,000, replete with a cast of Hollywood favorites, two directors, a Mendelssohn score and a Nijinska ballet, A Midsummer Night's Dream opened last week simultaneously in New York and London, accompanied by stampedes of mixed celebrities and louder cries of excitement from critics than have greeted any premiere in the last six months.

In point of fact, A Midsummer Night's Dream is by no means as bad as it might have been. The monotonous howlings of 10-year-old Mickey Rooney as Puck, the fatuous grinnings of Dick Powell and Ross Alexander, as the lovers bemused by his potions; the spectacle of Joe E. Brown cracking lichee nuts in a manner derived from Once in a Lifetime, as he impersonates Flute, the bellows-mender; and the over-energetic jabberings of James Cagncy as Bottom, the weaver, effectively combine to detract from the real merits of the production. Omitting much of the superb poetry which is the play's chief virtue, the screen version still contrives to run too long (2½ hr.). Nonetheless, by grace of Hal Mohr's magnificent photography, which makes the backgrounds far more effective than any stage set could ever be. plus Composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold's brilliant arrangement of the Mendelssohn score, and the indestructibly entrancing spirit of the play itself, which is perfectly recaptured in some of the scenes in the wood near Athens. A Midsummer Night's Dream becomes definitely worth seeing, both as a work of art and as an expensive and experimental curiosity. It compares favorably with any stage production the play is likely to receive. Ably directed by William Dieterle, assisted by rather than assisting Max Reinhardt who gave him his start as an actor in Germany, it seems likely to start a Shakespeare cycle in the cinema.

Long before A Midsummer Night's Dream had got beyond the casting stage in Hollywood, London literary bigwigs were holding indignation meetings to denounce Hollywood's "impudence" in meddling with such a classic. In London last week, where U. S. Ambassador Bingham, Mrs. Winston Churchill, the Marquess of Queensberry, Sir Philip Ben Greet, and a theatre full of their peers saw the opening. newspaper critics agreed that A Mid-summer Night's Dream was "exquisite." '"dazzling," ''magnificent," "of extraordinary beauty." In Manhattan, where so many reviewers attended the first night that the gala premiere for celebrities had to be held a night later, Franchot Tone and Joan Crawford held up Broadway sidewalk traffic for ten minutes and critics were equally bedazzled.