Paul Czinner | As You Like It / 1936

a void of loving

by Douglas Messerli

 

J. M. Barrie (treatment), R. J. Cullen (scenario, based on the play by William Shakespeare), Paul Czinner (director) As You Like It / 1936

 

In the decade before director Paul Czinner and his wife, the notable actress Elisabeth Bergner, filmed the notable and fairly well-received production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, safely in England after escaping Hitler’s persecution, Czinner had already directed two films in which young women escaped their own unpleasant situations by dressing as and impersonating boys, the 1926 film The Fiddler of Florence and the lesser known 1927 film Doña Juana, both starring Bergner.

     The couple had married in Vienna where they had escaped from Germany, presumably because, despite Czinner’s homosexuality they found one another quite compatible and as a couple Czinner at least would be protected from being arrested as a queer and as a married couple (both were also Jewish) they could perhaps find it easier to travel on to England and later, as they did, to the US. Moreover, as a cinema director he could feature his wife, who had long before established herself as a major German-language actor, having played Rosalind, the role she undertook in this 1936 film production—so the publicists proclaimed—over 600 times.

      What we see in the film, accordingly, is a historical record of a great actresses’ final performance of her most noted role and, a rendition that evidenced acting that had become, perhaps, overly learned and performed by rote.

    Certainly, a German-language speaker performing across from Laurence Olivier might have expected to be criticized in performing England’s greatest playwright on British soil. But, except for her occasionally foreign accent, basically the critics were kind both to her and to the production, which despite the mixed grumblings of Graham Greene, has gone on to be seen by some as a cinematic model for this particular work.

     That is not to say there are no problems with Czinner’s particular interpretation, in part because cinematically he plays it far too safe and by 1936 the British Board of Film Censors' sought out immodesty as seriously as the US Hays board and Joseph Breen sniffed out immorality and queer perversion. Shakespeare, obviously, might be said to offer up both. Whether this seemingly tamed-down version of the heady gender mix-up played out by lady Rosalind as the young boy Ganymede and the Rosalind-smitten Orlando let loose in the wilds of Arden Forest, is a product of the director’s own timidity—highly unlikely, given the sexual tensions he and actress Bergner built up in their 1926 film between the young boy violinist and the painter played by Walter Rilla, which really does present a situation in which the painter has abducted a kind of Ganymede which he can hardly resist to touch—or there were other forces at work is hard to determine. But, if nothing else, we certainly must admit that the Ganymede in this version As You Like It is not a boy so beautiful that Orlando is tempted to abduct him and keep as a catamite.

        If anything, Bergner, under her husband’s director, plays the young boy who is supposed to be able to protect his sister Aliena (Sophie Stewart) from the green snakes and lionesses of the Arden wilds is far too fey and feminine to live up to that task. At moments, indeed, as several critics observed—perhaps encouraged by noting James M. Barrie’s involvement in this production—that Bergner turns the young would-be protector into a kind of Peter Pan, as Rosalind/Ganymede leaps about the forest in absolute delight for Orlando’s tacked-up and tree- tattooed declarations of his love for her other self, looking at moments as if she were seeking out the lost boys to share her delights since Aliena/Celia is such a spoil-sport.

      At other moments, however, slapping her potential lover with a branch, she uses it more like a whip, both tantalizing and punishing Orlando for his forwardness with Rosalind and lack of attention to her male persona. Bergner almost seems confused at times whether she is a girlish court boy or a boyish sexual flirt purposely playing with Orlando’s love as if it were a form of torture only he/she can properly execute.

      As critic Russell Jackson observes in his essay, “Filming As You Like It: A Playful Comedy Becomes a Problem,” “Orlando’s failure to recognise Ganymede as a boy – if not as a princess – could only be explained by the elaborateness of Rosalind’s court costume and his acceptance that boy-girls are a fact of life.”

      But on the other hand, as Jackson points out,

 

“A very few critics, at least among those I have been able to read, noticed (or thought fit to mention) the oddest aspect of Bergner’s performance: its sexiness. Given that this was a famous element of her appeal as acknowledged by German critics and admirers, the lack of response may well indicate a cultural difference, an English sense of proper restraint. As Stephen M. Buhler observes, ‘Bergner’s performance, intended to be reassuringly feminine, quickly become irritating in the context,’ and Czinner may well have underestimated the British audience’s readiness to accept ‘gender-bending’, given the popularity of Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo. Raymond Mortimer in the New Statesman and Nation moved directly to the nub of the matter: ‘Miss Bergner’s gravest mistake is that she has taken from Rosalind her innocence […] the smile at moments lengthens to a leer; the jerkined girl weighs the luscious Orlando with too greedy and too knowing an eye, and we feel that she will reveal herself a witch and gobble him up. Peter Pan has got mixed up with something out of Strindberg.’”

     These tensions, of course, are also in Shakespeare’s lines. Rosalind as Ganymede is asked to play the loving torturer while suffering herself as the tortured lover. Demanding Orlando’s daily wooing of herself as a boy she insists he call him by his lover’s name, Ganymede/Rosaliand has created a situation as a kind of terrible test of his own sexuality, a cure as she calls it, if from which he recovers he finally becomes worthy of the real woman. In short, the essence of the play is itself a sort of strange sado-masochistic game wherein he is forced to be tempted by a boy who resembles Rosalind without giving into that boy’s sexual flirtations. Ganymede sets the terms in Act III, scene ii:

 

    “Ganymede: Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too. Yet I profess curing it by counsel.

     Orlando: Did you ever cure any so?

     Ganymede: Yes, one; and this manner. He was to imagine me his love, his mistress; and I set him every day to woo me: at which time would I, being but a moonish youth, grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing and liking; proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles, for every passion something, and for no passion truly anything, as boys and women are, for the most part, cattle of this colour; would now like him, now loathe him; then entertain him, then forswear him; now weep for him, then spit at him; that I drave my suitor from his mad humour of love to a living humour of madness, which was, to forswear the full stream of the world, and to live in a nook merely monastic. And thus I cured him; and this way will I take upon me to wash your liver as clean as a sound sheep’s heart, that there shall not be one spot of love in’t.”

 

     The paradoxes that a critic such as Mortimer and Arthur Eloesser* observed in Bergner’s acting are called for in the script. My criticism is simply that Bergner seems to forget to play the boy behind the personae she is asked to perform. Through it all, for Orlando to truly be tested, he must give up or at least ponder giving up his remembered Rosalind for the eager pretender before him. But Bergner’s energetic expressions of the extremes, the Peter Pan who whips his Wendy, does not allow Olivier the chance to show any pleasure in the boy behind these acts.

      As Jackson perceptively notes,

   

“Olivier did not enjoy his experience, and he complained that Bergner did not do him the customary courtesy of reading in her lines ‘off camera’ when appropriate. Rosalind as Ganymede adopts a deep, throaty voice that makes her seem very bossy indeed. (And has an echo of Dietrich, too.) When Ganymede is impersonating Rosalind, the voice is lighter, with a fluty tone that may well be a Viennese mannerism, but the element of putting Orlando in his place still seems to predominate. Armed with a supple branch with a single leaf on the end, which she deploys as if it were an instrument of mild if not quite titillating chastisement, this Ganymede/Rosalind is a wistfully stern taskmistress. There’s no sense that Orlando finds this anything other than peculiar – he certainly doesn’t for a moment look as though he might fancy the figure before him – and a level of complexity that performances in the last two decades have explored is altogether absent. Bergner as Ganymede may well be appealing more to the cinema audience than to Orlando. It is the audience (and Celia) who witness the apogee of her love-sickness, the forward roll she executes to demonstrate how many fathom deep she is in love. Meanwhile Orlando has to act opposite something called ‘Bergner’s Rosalind’ rather than an interpretation that might be altered or developed by whatever he does.”

        Hard to imagine as it might be, the handsome Olivier, far more breathtakingly beautiful than his Ganymede is almost erased from his most important scenes. Bergner almost sucks the attention in her physical presence from all the other actors, not so much out of apparent ego, as in seemingly seeking to surround herself with a kind of void.

        In becoming Eros herself she could not be shot down by someone else’s arrow. One imagines, in fact, an almost intentional distraction by both director and artist, a way to skirt any possible censorial eyes from what truly is at the heart of the play, the potentiality at all times for Orlando to give up the real Rosalind for her boy pretender and run off to him to Never Neverland.   

        In those early pre-war days, when the world had begun to go crazy and censor boards in England and the USA had banned any real depiction of sexual expression or, most particularly, of sexual confusion, it was certainly safer to run off with the text that might betray these possibilities with sound and fury as Bergner does.

 

*See Russell Jackson’s essay in Société Française Shakespeare, Vol. 23, 2005.

 

Los Angeles, April 24, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).