National Board of Review Magazine (Jan 1936 - Dec 1938)

12 National Board of Review Magazine still not Shakespeare, the glory of which lies, not in camera effects, but in thought superlatively clothed in the written or spoken line. The minute such pictorial translation is made, as it was made in portions of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the difference between the 16th Century drama medium and the 20th Century cinema medium makes itself felt. One is pulled up sharply and made to look when one would prefer only to listen. The constant beauty of Shakespeare's lines takes listening. The production of As You Like It places the emphasis where it belongs — on the text. It brings home the point that the play was written to be acted. Romeo and Juliet had splendor. A Midsummer Night's Dream had ornamentation, with perhaps a little of the architectural flavor of Potsdam. As You Like It has personality. To the part of Rosalind Miss Bergner brings joy and vivacity and grace. Her Rosalind is Shakespeare's Rosalind who allows her heart, a bit absurdly, to run away with itself, but who keeps her wit at home in her head. Her character is independent of geography. She is not so much an English lady in love as any lady in love. She is youth in love. And youth and love being without nationality, the slightly Teutonic accent which is part of Miss Bergner's charm readily becomes part of Rosalind's, so thoroughly does she identify herself with the role. It is said that Miss Bergner was willing enough to wear some of the lovely costumes that had been designed for her screen performance but that she insisted on wearing in the forest scenes the little leather jerkin which she had worn during her hundreds of appearances on the Berlin stage. It might be added that she wears the part as she wears the jacket, with an air of ease and custom and affection, yet with no lack of spontaneity. For me, at least, As You Like It successfully creates the "illusion of the first time," a difficult feat for any production and most difficult for a "classic." Wasn't it Lorelei in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes who was so disappointed when she came to read Shakespeare to find that the plays were made up principally of quotations? And yet in As You Like It some of the lyrics and even such familiar lines as the "seven ages" speech seem to fall from the lips of the characters as if they were at that instant being thought and uttered by the speaker. Jacques, Orlando, Touchstone, the banished duke do not declaim as they so easily might. They speak their poetry naturally, and we are entirely willing to accept poetry as the language of a people who inhabit so curious a place as the Forest of Arden in which also dwell such seeming incompatibles as a cow, a lioness, a serpent, and a plethora of sheep. All the animals, especially the sheep, were rather badly handled, but so were the sheep in Romeo and Juliet. The noble young Montague, having sought them out, seemed bent on keeping to himself. Only Pasteur did well by his appealing woolly friends. (There's a subject for a dissertation: "Sheep on the Screen.") But in As You Like It the animals and the "props" and the settings can be as fantastic as they please. The vital quality is in the text which created a highly satisfactory imaginary Forest of Arden out of the bare boards of the old Globe Theatre. Bowing to later stage and screen convention, the film has, of course, its sets, but, like the text, they are exact neither in time nor space. They were designed by the young Frenchman Lazare Meerson who proved in La Kermesse Heroique that, if he wanted to, he could make his settings real. He conjured up early 17th Century Flanders when he wanted to conjure up early 17th Century Flanders. The assumption, then, is that, if the Forest of Arden has a certain papier mache quality, it is because he did not want it otherwise; once more he was making his settings match his text. Comedy leaning toward fantasy does not need a sturdy backing. A too solid place would have given the film a Victor Jorishness — fairy form gone a bit to girth around the waist. The music, like the settings, is in keeping with the play, but it goes beyond mere appropriateness. It is no musical pot-pourri of dog's eared compositions, so common in films. It is an original and imaginative score composed by William Walton and