A Dream Comes True (1935) User Reviews

Promotional film to create interest in the feature film...

[Doylenf · 6/10 · 13 May 2007]

Warner Bros. spent such a lavish budget on their production of Shakespeare's A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM that they went all out to market it to audiences not accustomed to viewing anything quite so literary, especially from the studio that featured mostly crime melodramas with stars like Cagney and Edward G. Robinson.

So they created a short movie that would acquaint movie-goers with cast members of the film talking briefly about their participation.

Among the cast members: JAMES CAGNEY, DICK POWELL, OLIVIA DE HAVILLAND, MICKEY ROONEY, ARTHUR TREACHER, VICTOR JORY, ANITA LOUISE and many other contract players.

There's a certain old-fashioned charm to this style of promoting a film and it's certainly interesting to see these actors talking about their roles and their high expectations for the film's success.

Apparently it worked. While not a great financial success, the film did win some critical approval and ended up with an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. Warners did the same thing the following year with ANTHONY ADVERSE, again presenting a promotional feature that had the various actors/actresses talking about their roles in the film.

This ancient "Making of" details how Warner Bros. trapped rival film studio MGM into . . .

[oscaralbert · 7/10 · 1 December 2017]

. . . following their lead with A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM into the swampy morass of foisting off a literature-based "kitchen sink" bladder-busting snooze fest upon a Too-Trusting American Public in the guise of "Good Entertainment." MGM, of course, swallowed Warner's DREAM bait hook, line, and stinker, snapping up the film rights to Margaret Mitchell's boring and seemingly endless (not to mention Mind-Bogglingly racist) Civil War tome, GONE WITH THE WIND, which permanently established MGM's deplorable brand as a Blow-hard Fake Facts Factory. The rest is History (and, if I'm not mistaken, Warner got the last laugh by acquiring MGM for about two bits at a bankruptcy sale, and relegating them to a little closet making flicks such as ISHTAR 2). Narrator Addison Richards successfully reels in the MGM execs during this puff piece A DREAM COME TRUE, making it seem that the sure way to Boffo Box Office is to throw EVERY star, no matter how dim, into over-hyped screen marathons with "Entrance, Intermission, and Exit" Music. The dead giveaway that Warner was actually spoofing MGM is that Warner thriftily filmed DREAM in black & white, with most of its in-house cast working for "scale." This prompted MGM to creep way out on the flimsiest of limbs, mounting world-wide "casting searches" and monopolizing literally EVERY piece of Technicolor Equipment in Tinseltown. As everyone now knows, Hollywood insiders predict it will take GWTW at least 13 more re-releases to show a profit on its balance sheet (assuming America allows deluded Racists to remain within our Homeland that long to buy movie tickets!).