Page 102 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

Sophisticated Comedy I 91

in love; Rosalind, though capable of loving deeply, never loses self-
control. Like Viola, she disguises herself as a boy (Ganymede) and
befriends a nobleman without letting him take control of her fate.
Rosalind is, simply, Shakespeare's ideal woman, combining the best
qualities of his other heroines without suffering their limitations.
On the American stage, Katharine Hepburn brought her unique
presence to the role, creating the quintessential Rosalind for our
twentieth century; on film, she would masquerade as a boy in George
Cukor's Sylvia Scarlett (1935). Unfortunately, Kate did not play the
part in Paul Czinner's 1936 motion picture. Czinner mounted his
ambitious $1 million film as combination valentine-vanity project
for his wife, German actress Elisabeth Bergner. The casting was dis-
astrous. Newsweek noted that she "voices her passion in German
gutturals," also pointing out "her temperamental inability to stop
wriggling." According to film historian Roger Manvell, Bergner "had
a screen personality diametrically opposed to that of Rosalind.
Rosalind is a forthright woman, capable, provocative and determined
beneath her surface diffidence and charm. Bergner's screen [presence]
has an ageless, kittenish quality." Bergner is dizzyingly coquettish, all
wrong for Rosalind.
The pity is, if one can manage to overlook Bergner's impossible
performance, this British production has much to admire. As You
Like It marked Olivier's first screen appearance in Shakespeare; his
Orlando, masculine yet sensitive, is in itself enough to make the
movie worth watching. Leon Quartermaine's reading of Jaque's "man
is a poor player, strutting" briefly onto the world's stage is exquisite,
happily preserved for all time on celluloid.
Clearly, everyone involved hoped to achieve something special in
the way of a fusion between Shakespeare and the cinema. Sir James
Barrie, who had created a preadolescent Arden of his own in Peter
Pan, fashioned the treatment, which screenwriter R. J. Cullen and
Karl Mayer expanded into a scenario, cutting Shakespeare without
adding anything else. "I would like you to believe we have made the
film with love and with reverence," Bergner stated. "We have had
slightly to cut the longer speeches, but every word that we have left
out has only been after argument, quarreling, and occasional tears."
She understated the trimming because one-third of the play is gone.
Missing are several significant speeches, including Jaques's boast that
through verbal expression of his dark intellect he might "cleanse the
foul body of the infected world" and his cynical undercutting of all