A Midsummer Night's Dream
by Max Reinhardt, William Dieterle
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Dick Powell, Hobart Cavanaugh, Ian Hunter, James Cagney, Verree TeasdaleDirector: Max Reinhardt, William Dieterle
Brand: Warner Brothers
Producer: Hal B. Wallis
Producer: Henry Blanke
Producer: Jack L. Warner
Writer: Charles Kenyon
Writer: Mary C. McCall Jr.
Writer: William Shakespeare
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Portuguese (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD, NTSC, Original recording remastered, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 133 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-08-14
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Product features:
- Love is blind, fickle and true. And under the sway of capricious fairies it becomes blinder ( a queen romances as donkey), more fickle (best friends swoon over each other's beau) and truest of all (lovers repledge their devotion). "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" in Shakespeare's bewitching comedy!Running Time: 143 min. Format: DVD MOVIE Genre:?DRAMA Rating:?NR Age:?012
Movie Reviews of A Midsummer Night's Dream
Movie Review: My 10th Graders Love It
Summary: 5 Stars
While all of the criticisms of this film are true to form: it exaggerates the visuals Shakespeare probably intended, Bottom has a wife and small subplot, the musical interludes are long and irrelevant, so is the praise of the film, most importantly being that Puck is captivatingly feral and likely the best Puck on film.
What might be more important, even still, and is to me as instructor of the play, is that my tenth grade English Language Learners, year after year, find themselves in hysterics throughout the entire film. The mechanicals are ridiculously amusing in their acting attempts, Puck is crazily funny, and the four lovers exaggerated facial expressions and antics towards one another are without compare. It is an old black and white film, and yet the high schoolers of the 21st century prefer it, and thoroughly enjoy it. If you teach this play, buy THIS version.
Summary of A Midsummer Night's Dream
Love is blind, fickle and true. And under the sway of capricious fairies it becomes blinder ( a queen romances as donkey), more fickle (best friends swoon over each other's beau) and truest of all (lovers repledge their devotion). "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" in Shakespeare's bewitching comedy!James Cagney and Mickey Rooney romping in a Shakespearian fairyland? This could only be A Midsummer Night's Dream, Warner Bros.' 1935 attempt at classing up the proletarian studio. The legendary German stage director Max Reinhardt had produced the play at the Hollywood Bowl to enchanted, sold-out audiences, and Warners decided to hand Reinhardt the keys to the studio (along with fellow Germans William Dieterle, co-director, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who adapted Mendelssohn's music). Reinhardt created an eye-popping phantasmagoria, a movie laced with sparkling sequins, flying fairies, and moon-kissed forests. As for the words, Reinhardt had a collection of Warners studio players, notably James Cagney as Bottom, whose playing of "Pyramus and Thisby" with Joe E. Brown is perhaps the movie's comic high point. The other actors are decidedly varied, and they tend to be overwhelmed by the production design. Not so Mickey Rooney, whose performance as Puck is a feral, antic act of imagination (he was 14 during filming); picture a boy raised by wolves who somehow memorized Shakespeare. His Puck growls and screams and mocks the drama of the other characters, a little postmodern imp before his time. (Critic David Thomson called this Puck "truly inhuman, one of the cinema's most arresting pieces of magic"). The rest of the movie comes to earth with some regularity, but it's a one-of-a-kind production, and a reminder of the lavish, unreal possibilities within a movie studio. --Robert Horton
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