A Midsummer Night's Dream (1968-Royal Shakespeare Company)

This was made in the sixties and is an extremely dated movie.  That said...

I must talk about the fairy scenes first.  The costumes consist of a whole lotta green paint and little else.  This is entertaining and is the best use of green paint I have ever seen, but it makes it hard to concentrate because you're too busy laughing.  I also was not that thrilled with most of Ian Holm's performance of Puck.  The use of small children as minor fairies was intriguing.  But the donkey head on Bottom was kind of ridiculous.

The Athens scenes were the most dated by the clothes and hair.  Generally they were fine.  Another part that made it hard for me to take this movie seriously was the fact that while Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia, and Helena were in the woods, the dirt on their faces kept shifting places from shot to shot.

My favorite part of this was the mechanical scenes, especially the first scene when Bottom keeps interrupting everybody else.  This was just classic.  And the final play-within-a-play was done quite well.

Overall, this was a mediocre movie but still worth watching.

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