Deference too β notice that Max Reinhardt gets bigger billing than the brothers themselves. Notice something else, the background. A more charitable eye might have perceived that the artists and craftsmen behind the screen understood and honored that poetry, and were doing their best to render it faithfully in the visual medium that was their own area of expertise.
In such a setting, a bare stage and simple green curtains would hardly do, so Reinhardt had transformed the play into a spectacular, awe-inspiring pageant. Whether direct credit for the final look of the movie goes to Prof. Like this, for instance. I believe he would have, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a snob beyond redemption.
But did he see it that way? He did not. Fields might have been fun, but the idea was a nonstarter β he was shooting David Copperfield over at MGM. But Reinhardt made an executive decision and Kibbee was out, Cagney in. Fifty-two-year old Guy Kibbee would have been a comfortable choice for Bottom β a little old, maybe, but the right physical and character type β and he probably would have passed muster with the critics except those in England who sniffed that there were just too damn many American accents in the cast.
But faced with the fait accompli of his casting, Cagney rolled up his sleeves and got to work. Here, for example, is the on-screen equivalent of that posed publicity shot of Titania and Bottom that I showed in Part 1.
And here we are again with Hermia, as she contemplates eloping to beyond the forest with her true love Lysander. Again, is that counterpoint explicitly to be found in Shakespeare? Perhaps not. But is it an astute comment on the intertwined stories of the Dream? And it shows again an acute understanding of the material running all through the Warner lot in Burbank, not as some critics then and now would have it a blundering blindness to the beauty of what they were manhandling in their clumsy paws.
