Yesterday's Hits: Romeo and Juliet (1968, Franco Zeffirelli)

Paul Clark — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made Romeo and Juliet a hit?: While it’s debatable whether Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare’s finest play, it’s almost certainly his most beloved. After all, not everyone can relate to the trials and tribulations of kings, but most of us know what it’s like to be young and in love. Yet until 1968, all “straight” big-screen adaptations of the play had been cast with adults. By casting a pair of age-appropriate teenagers Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey (who were 17 and 15, respectively, during filming) in the title roles, Zeffirelli’s take on Romeo and Juliet appealed to youth in a way previous productions could not.

While the handsome production values and timeless source material appealed to older moviegoers, it was the attractive stars- along with the story of two idealistic lovers defying their oppressive parents to be together- that helped the film hit home with younger audiences. Romeo and Juliet became one of the great big-screen romances of the late 1960s. Not incidentally, it also spawned the hit song “A Time For Us” (based on Nino Rota’s love theme from the film) that quickly became a staple of many weddings of the day- my own parents' wedding included.

What happened?: For years, Romeo and Juliet sustained a degree of popularity among movie lovers, even after it had disappeared from first-run theatres. But after the rise of video, the film took on a new life as a teaching aid in classrooms across the country. However, rather than increasing the film’s popularity with audiences, this favorite of sixties-era youth suddenly turned into something dry and academic, a movie that was to be suffered through rather than enjoyed. As the years passed, fewer audiences came to Zeffirelli’s film on their own, and by the time Baz Luhrmann made his own pop version of the play in 1996, the love it had once received from moviegoers had long since subsided.

Does Romeo and Juliet still work?: Much to my surprise, it does- quite well, in fact. Like many people my age, I hadn’t seen the film since it was shown to us back in high school, during freshman-year English class. At the time, I barely paid attention to the movie itself, mostly being grateful that we didn’t have any reading to do on the days the movie was playing. But the intervening years- and my greater love for Shakespeare’s work- have allowed me to appreciate how well Zeffirelli captured the spirit of the original play, while at the same time making it completely cinematic.

Naturally, it’s hard to argue with the source material- after all, it’s Shakespeare. But while he made judicious trims to the original text, Zeffirelli was extremely successful at capturing the universal appeal of Romeo and Juliet on film, while keeping it completely in period. It couldn’t have been easy, but Zeffirelli immerses us in the world of pre-Renaissance Verona so sure-handedly that I never once scoffed at the idea of watching actors prancing around in tights and speaking in verse.

Even more than most classical playwrights, it’s difficult to fully appreciate Shakespeare simply by reading the plays. On the page, the language has a tendency to overwhelm the story, so that a reader will often find it difficult to puzzle out everything that’s happening, what with all the dialogue. One of the triumphs of Zeffirelli’s production is how un-stagy it feels. As the events play out onscreen, they work as drama rather than filmed theatre, which gives them an immediacy lacking in many other Shakespeare adaptations.

This is where Zeffirelli’s decision to cast age-appropriate unknowns, rather than older established stars, paid off beautifully. Watching previous productions of Romeo and Juliet- say, the George Cukor version starring Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard- there’s always a degree of self-consciousness to the performances, as if the actors are trying to recapture the impetuousness of youth in order to make the story work. This wasn’t a problem for Whiting and Hussey, who although they sometimes struggled a bit with Shakespeare’s language, had no trouble whatsoever with the tempestuous emotions that are so often stirred up by young love. It’s because of this that I believed these two as Romeo and Juliet in a way I’ve never been able to with other actors, no matter how talented they might be.

Another reason the movie works is because Zeffirelli doesn’t shy away from the more comedic aspects of the film. Many filmmakers are so in awe of Shakespeare that they approach his work like pious students, making stone-faced adaptations of Great Works of Literature. But Zeffirelli recognized that, like almost all of Shakespeare’s plays, Romeo and Juliet contains crowd-pleasing- even “low”- humor. For example, on the page the Nurse feels like little more than a plot device, a servant character who secretly aids the lovers. But as played by Pat Heywood in the film, she’s a serial scene-stealer, attending to her business as she tries- and usually fails- to keep her bawdy side in check.

Zeffirelli’s embracing of the play’s humorous material pays off magnificently in the film’s centerpiece, the confrontation between Mercutio and Tybalt. Most directors would have their sword fight play out solemnly, accompanied by exciting music. But instead, Zeffirelli has the irrepressible Mercutio (John McEnery) clown around with Tybalt (Michael York), as a way to defend himself against a superior swordsman. Of course, the crowd eats it up, and the scene is accompanied by a great deal of laughter by those gathered around. As a result, it hits that much harder when Tybalt stabs Mercutio in earnest, since the almost slapstick-y sword fight has suddenly turned deadly serious.

But consider what happens afterward. Tybalt, realizing what has happened, runs away with his men. But Mercutio’s friends interpret his stumbling as yet another jest, and continue laughing. The more he visibly suffers, the more they laugh at his perceived joke, while only Romeo begins to see the truth. It’s not until Mercutio struggles up a flight of stairs and screams, “a plague o’er both your houses!” that they realize what’s really happened.

In the end, this is probably the greatest triumph of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet- that he’s able to find the emotional truth behind Shakespeare’s beloved romantic tragedy in a way that gives it immediacy. It’s the difference between a director who simply respects Shakespeare and one who loves him enough to do justice to his work. Romeo and Juliet isn’t simply a dutiful Shakespeare adaptation; it’s an involving and emotionally satisfying movie in its own right.

Home Video Rep Report: "Forbidden Hollywood Collection - Vol.2"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

As Paul Clark recently pointed out, this is the week that No Country for Old Men came out on DVD. Which is all well and good, but I just saw it a few months ago. So did you, probably, but when's the last time you saw Clark Gable, in a mondo-bondage chauffeur outfit, punch out Barbara Stanwyck for interfering with his plans to keep their employer drunk so he can starve her children to death, or Humphrey Bogart taking one look at wide-eyed Ann Dvorak and miming sniffing something powdery while flashing his dirtiest grin and snickering, "Uh-oh!" These charming relics of Hollywood's early wildcat period can be found in the new three-disc set Forbidden Hollywood Collection - Vol.2, assembled from the vaults of Turner Classic Movies. (Volume One, which came out last year, included the long-lost Stanwyck vehicle Angel Face and the giddily scandalous Jean Harlow movie Red Headed Woman.) The discs provide a handy sampler of what Hollywood comedies and melodramas got into in the Pre-Code days before censors roused the rabble and threw a corset around Mae West. For sheer entertainment value, the new set is worth picking up just for 1931's Night Nurse, the hard-headed, hard-boiled nifty starring Stanwyck, Gable, and the platinum wisecrack dispenser Joan Blondell, and the 1932 Three on a Match, in which Blondell is the smart good girl who gets the guy, Ann Dvorak is the good-time girl who doesn't appreciate the guy, and Bette Davis is the one who makes contemporary audiences go, "Jesus Christ, Ann Dvorak makes Bette Davis look like a whipped mouse!" Match makes the case that the cult icon Dvorak, best remembered now as Paul Muni's sister in the original Scarface, deserves to be remembered as the quivering embodiment of the Pre-Code spirit. In the inevitable TCM documentary that's included in the DVD set, she's likened to a sputtering live wire, and she seems to be having a more exciting time than anyone else onscreen whether she's resisting temptation (which was something she never did for long), giving in to temptation (diving in with both feet), or paying for her sins by diving out a window with instructions to the police written on her nightie with lipstick.

The set also includes two Norma Shearer pictures, The Divorcee, which won the boring old thing an Academy Award for Best Actress of 1930, and A Free Soul, which came out the next year and won a Best Actor Award for Lionel Barrymore, who played her father. As that data may suggest, these were A-pictures in their day, but they don't hold up as well as the B's do. But they do have some historical interest, in part because they reveal what people who thought they were looking for something wild and steamy but who couldn't deal with the sight of Ann Dvorak in full writhe were prepared to settle for. Coiffed and dressed to the nines, Shearer could pass for a pretty hot number, though she could never act for shit, and the whole point of her pictures was to let her get just enough of a whiff of liberated hedonism to get her to run back to hubby and daddy. Like Night Nurse, A Free Soul is notable for bottling the dirty essence of Pre-Code Clark Gable, who is once again cast as a magnetic crook who keeps a highborn gal, Shearer, in sexual thrall, to the point that her fiancee. Leslie Howard, is obliged to shoot the blighter. (After that, Barrymore, a lawyer, is obliged to defend Howard in court by telling the jury that none of this would have happened if he'd just had the foresight to lock his daughter in the bedroom until her hormones settled down.) Also included is Female (1932), which stars Ruth Chatterton as a rich car company owner whose casual affair with George Brent turns all serious and shit. It falls between the two stools set by Dvorak and Shearer; Chatterton gets to have some fun early on treating her employee pool as her own personal stud stable, but by the end she's imploring Brent not just to marry her but to take charge of her company so she'll be free to stay at home and turn out enough kids that they can start their own baseball team.

The Screengrab : norma shearer

Yesterday's Hits: Romeo and Juliet (1968, Franco Zeffirelli)

Home Video Rep Report: "Forbidden Hollywood Collection - Vol.2"