Comme il vous plaira

Laurence Olivier in his first Shakespeare adaptation on screen. This is the first motif to see this old film , good kick to discover the root of classic performances from Shakespeare universe.

The second virtue - the noble effort of Elizabeth Bergner to create a beautiful Rosalind portrait , using her experience in polish of it on German scene. Her accent ? I saw it as good point , defining exactly the determination to propose a professional performance.

Yes, not great but profound charming, offering a seductive return to the connection between rosalind and Orlando and decent solutions for a real seductive adaptation.

Honestly really, really wanted to like it. Shakespeare is one of the all-time great and most important playwrights and even in his lesser plays (such as 'As You Like It') his mastery of language and emotions and complex characterisations shone. Am a big admirer of Laurence Olivier, 'Rebecca', 'Brideshead Revisited' and all his succeeding Shakespeare roles. Am not the biggest of fans of this particular play, love the characters and text but the story is far from great.

Which is accentuated in this early film adaptation. It is primarily to be seen for seeing an early Shakespeare film and to see early career Olivier in his first Shakespeare role, also to be seen if you want to see every Shakespeare film posible and all available versions of 'As You Like It'. Sadly, beyond being a curio this is to me and quite a number of others seemingly is not a good film and another adaptation to show that 'As You Like It' is very hard to do well. Have yet to see a great version, the best available to me is the 1978 BBC Television Shakespeare adaptation and that had major shortcomings as well.

This adaptation of 'As You Like It' does have good things. There are a few good performances, Sophie Stewart is very endearing and sincere and Leon Quartermaine is suitably pompous as Jacques, his speech is one of 'As You Like It's' best moments which Quartermaine delivers more than believably (lives it actually). Felix Aylmer was always reliable and gives another strong performance. Olivier definitely went on to much better things and was more comfortable in his other Shakespearean roles, but already he showed a lot of understanding of Shakespeare's language, is in command of it and delivers his lines beautifully, didn't detect any awkwardness here.

A couple of other good things as well. The sets are both rustic and lavish enough and there is some nice whimsy here and there.

On the other hand, there are a lot of drawbacks. Starting with the near-universally, and unsurprisingly so in my view, panned performance of Elisabeth Bergner, Rosalind is a taxing and complex role and Bergner was clearly taxed. She doesn't look comfortable and a lot of her line delivery is unintentionally hilarious and not always comprehensible. Mackenzie Ward for my tastes was also very bland as Touchstone. Shakespeare's text itself is wonderful, but the delivery here varies. Great with Stewart, Olivier and Quartermaine but disastrous with Bergner. While there is some nice whimsy, 'As You Like It' is very comedic, here there actually is not enough emphasis on it and it's downplayed.

Direction tends to be too stagy, even for the time, and lacks distinction, the action also feels static. The storytelling is poorly done, the thinness of the play's story itself is very obvious through the pedestrian at best and often creaky pacing and the film does nothing to improve upon the problems of the play's ending, it's still incredibly absurd and comes out of nowhere. Other than the sets, 'As You Like It' doesn't look particularly good, the photography is too static and over simple and the costumes are as unflattering and unintentionally bizarre as they come.

Concluding, didn't like this very much sad to say. 4/10

Unfortunately, Shakespeare's comedy 'As You Like It' has much of its comic aspects drained in this particular film version of the play, because of the sodden performances of a couple of players, Mackenzie Ward as Touchstone and Elizabeth Bergner as Rosalind.

The part of the Fool was an important part of Shakespearean plays, delivering pointed messages in the guise of witty remarks and jests. In this film, Touchstone's lines are breezed through so quickly and leadenly that the messages are lost. Bergner's Rosalind, was far worse. Rosalind was supposed to be disguised as a youthful man delivering acquired wisdom to men. I would have expected mainly a mock-serious performance, at most. Instead, Bergner performs Rosalind in a kind of giddy glee throughout, which must have marred her delivery of lines through that toothy grin combined with her Austrian accent.

Laurence Olivier, while performing in the more naturalistic way we would expect of a modern film actor, seems at times as if he's trying to get over with the whole thing, as might be expected if the rumors of artistic conflicts are true.

Sophie Stewart as Celia delivers probably the truest performance. Henry Ainley, Felix Aylmer, Leon Quartermain, and Dorice Fordred give nice performances as the two dukes, Jacques, and Audrey in minor parts. Peter Bull (the Russian ambassador from 'Dr. Strangelove') makes a very recognizable appearance in the second half.

I feel I ought to comment on the many complaints about the 'staginess' of the diction. My opinion is that these complaints have mainly to do with a couple of minor characters (e.g., Charles the Wrestler). Keep in mind that this is 1936, when many stage and silent actors were still adapting to the motion picture. Many films based on stage plays at that time appeared stagy, and many did even later (consider 'A Long Day's Journey Into Night' or 'A Streetcar Named Desire'). Few of Shakespeare's plays had been adapted to the sound motion picture by 1936. Cut them a little slack!

This is very much in the same style as Max Reinhardt's ambitious rendering of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" a few years earlier, it's the same playfulness, the same fantastic imagination and innovations, the same good humour and the same kind of gorgeous sets with a number of sumptuous crowd scenes, and instead of Mendelssohn's music you have William Walton, who actually proves just as appropriate. This is one of those plays that are almost impossible to fail in, as it is so ingenious and well written with such adorable characters, and both Elisabeth Bergner and Laurence Olivier do credit to them indeed, Bergner actually almost outshining Olivier, whose fírst Shakespeare film this was. In comparison with Kenneth Branagh's version 70 years later, this is actually so much more enoyable, although it's without colours and much shorter, but Branagh's production is heavier, he has the tendency to always overdo everything in his films, and in this version everything is convincing and true to the original character of the play, while Branagh always must modernize and almost screw it up. The doiminating trait of the film is a very playful direction, you feel throughout that the director enjoyed doing this, perhaps even more than Reinhardt in the midsummer night play with Mickey Rooney as Puck and James Cagney as Bottom, and later on Paul Czinner made some of the best ballet films ever made. In brief, in spite of its early age and lack of technical maturity, this is a perfect Shakespeare film.

The main role, Rosalind, is well-played by the cute, vivacious Bergner. Olivier is good with the physical stuff (very graceful) and the repartee. He tends to fall flat on the soliloquies and extended reveries, though. (And he's wearing way too much makeup, including at times some very crooked lipstick.) The costumes and sets are vivid, probably meant to suggest a fairy-tale, and thus account for the ridiculous plot devices.

And despite the comments of another reviewer, the camera-work is not all "point-and-shoot." It is a bit static by today's standards, but not by those of 1936.

The biggest liability is the muddy, distant sound.

All in all, I liked it more than the average filmed Shakespeare, though it's not great by any means.