The 12 months was 1935, and the eighth Academy Awards ceremony was upon us. Frank Lloyd’s “Mutiny on the Bounty” was the Greatest Image winner and a serious frontrunner, with eight nominations and three for Greatest Actor alone. (The Oscars launched the Greatest Supporting Actor and Greatest Supporting Actress classes one 12 months later.)

One of many movies on the Greatest Image poll — alongside now-beloved classics just like the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musical “Prime Hat,” Michael Curtis’s dashing pirate journey “Captain Blood,” and fantastic however now comparatively obscure comedies like “Ruggles of Crimson Hole” and “Naughty Marietta” — was Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle’s “A Midsummer Evening’s Dream,” an all-star visible results spectacular, which tailored William Shakespeare’s fantastical farce to the massive display in opulent splendor.

Critics weren’t terribly variety to among the actors, however the fabulous imagery and visible results had been eye-popping wonders. Bespeckled with star filters, the movie takes place largely in an enchanted forest the place fairies and sprites frolicked and interfered with the amorous affairs of mortals. To at the present time it is tough to observe the movie with out marveling on the cinematic ingenuity, and questioning aloud simply how they pulled off among the film’s imagery many years earlier than the appearance of contemporary particular results.

So it is fairly bizarre that the film was utterly snubbed within the class of Greatest Cinematography, in favor of the movies “Barbary Coast,” “The Crusades,” and “Les Miserables.” However the Academy did not let that cease them. The voters wrote in “A Midsummer Evening’s Dream” anyway, and the award was finally offered to the movie’s director of pictures, Hal Mohr.