A Midsummer Night's Dream

Audience Reviews

View More

ChrisCSH H @RT12343453 Dec 1, 2025 This adaptation of Shakespeare, a Midsummer night‘s dream is definitely bold and many visuals are ahead of its time along with the entire fantasy story. Great performances by Olivia de Havilland, James Cagney and Mickey Rooney. See more michael d @RT16138633 Dec 17, 2021 Compared to other efforts to bring Shakespeare to the screen in the '30s, this film has aged remarkably well. This is chiefly due to the efforts of James Cagney and Joe E. Brown who are as fresh and funny today as they were 70 years ago. All scenes involving Bottom and crew, despite being cut, re-arranged and ad-libbed upon are hilarious is a broad sort of way. The rest of the cast is, sadly, less inspired. Jean Muir as Helena and Victor Jory as Oberon deserve commendation; Olivia deHavilland, despite being artificial and mannered at times, brings a lot of life to Hermia. The rest are write-offs and Mickey Rooney delivers an agonizingly awful performance as Puck. When Puck brays more than Bottom does, you know something's wrong. Reinhart's approach to Shakespeare is almost Victorian. A lot of time is spent on pageantry, ballet numbers and musical interludes not contemplated by the original play. Some of the lines are sung, not spoken, which creates a very bizarre effect indeed. All of this is quite distracting and many modern viewers will lose patience. See more May 5, 2021 Hauntingly beautiful and profoundly obsessive. See more jordan m @RT33422384 Feb 7, 2021 I did not enjoy watching this. It's not that they did a bad job making the movie, or that the acting was bad or anything like that because it wasn't. It's that A Midsummer Night's Dream is objectively not good cinematic material. Without the intimacy and prior knowledge that goes into watching this as a stage play and without an extremely lengthy running time it's just very difficult to get through the exposition and character development. This movie was extremely faithful to the source material, bordering on the unreasonable, and its running time went so long that they had to pad Mendelssohn's score made for the play, but it was so faithful that far too much screentime ended up devoted to the nothingburger of a play at the end, there were about 10 too many scenes of Rooney making that goofy laugh and most of the supporting cast seemed more concerned with nailing the Shakespearean diction instead of nailing their performances. The redeeming factor here was absolutely Cagney, particularly in his introductory scene as I have rarely witnessed an actor so thoroughly eclipse the rest of the cast in talent and magnetism. It's unfortunate he spent most of the movie with a donkey head. See more steve d @RT35616104 Jul 23, 2020 Average version of an ok show. See more Aug 26, 2018 Hindered by its length and exaggerated theatrics, A Midsummer Night's Dream overcomes its flaws with enchanting production values and elaborate set designs. See more Read all reviews

A Midsummer Night's Dream

My Rating

Read More Read Less WRITE A REVIEW EDIT REVIEW POST RATING