This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of
the release of Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo
and Juliet. The movie was a sensation when it came out in 1968, spurring
ticket sales in the millions and becoming one of the top-grossing features of
the decade. One reason the film made so much money was due to the number of
people who returned for a second or even fifth viewing. It seemed audiences
just couldn’t get enough of the story about those two star-crossed adolescent
lovers from old Verona. The movie’s memorable music score, composed by Nino
Rota, also became a best seller. The album quickly went gold and was later
repackaged in a beautiful deluxe box set that included the entire movie
soundtrack, along with two handsomely produced companion booklets.
There
was something about the film, for all its shortcomings, that many found almost hypnotic.
I’ll fess up and admit I was one of these people. I didn’t actually see it
until the 1970s when it was still being trotted out in theaters in order to
squeeze out extra profits for the studio. I was a teenager at the time and was
more into flicks like Billy Jack and
the Bond films than stories about people who lived hundreds of years ago and
spoke in rhyming couplets. The only Shakespeare I had read was in class, the
substance of which I found nearly indigestible.I did know something about the movie since one my English teachers had
once played a portion of the soundtrack for us in class. However, apparently
not having much else to do that summer evening, I decided to take a stroll down
the street to our local movie palace and buy a ticket.
The first thing I noticed about the film was
how rich in color it was. From the very beginning, following the smoky prologue
spoken by Laurence Olivier, everything is drenched in bright primary colors.
Things got off to a rousing start with the scene of the bloody brawl in the Verona
marketplace between those two wild and crazy families, the Montagues and the
Capulets. (I hadn’t realized until then that it was possible to be a real badass
and still wear red and yellow striped tights with pointy soft leather shoes.) Soon
the cops arrive (the prince and his soldiers) to break up the fracas and issue
a stern warning to all those who would disturb the civil peace in the future. Immediately
following this we get our first look at Romeo (Leonard Whiting), a handsome
love-sick youth with a shaggy haircut. He talks dreamily of some girl he’s got
a crush on, but then comes to his senses at seeing one of the wounded being
carried away. Meanwhile, back at the Capulet palace, Juliet’s father (Paul Hardwick) is coyly negotiating the
marriage of his daughter to a young man named Count Paris (Roberto Bisacco). The first time we see
Juliet (Olivia Hussey) she’s running through the house like a kid at play.
All this is interspersed between scenes of
Juliet and her bawdy, fun-loving nurse (Pat Heywood) talking to the girl’s mother
Lady Capulet (Natasha Parry)
about marriage and things, immediately followed by a night scene of Romeo and
his friends on a soliquious pub crawl through the deserted streets of Verona.
Later that same evening Romeo and his mates crash the Capulet masquerade ball. The ball scene is among the highlights of the film. It is here
Zeffirellireally shows his stuff,
combining visual pageantry with an almost obsessive attention to detail.
Everything about this sequence is highly choreographed, from the beautifully
composed dance scenes (“the moresca!â€) right down to the fastidious arrangement
of the candles and platters of fruit (Zeffirelli had studied art and architecture in his student days). Absolutely nothing is left to chance. In the hands of a less gifted
visual director, and Zeffirelli was nothing if he wasn’t visual, all of this might
have come off as too showy and distracting. However, here the effect is just
the opposite. The viewer almost feels as if he or she is present in the scene,
seductively pulled in as we are by the sensuous whirl of warm colors, voices
and melodious music. All of it lovingly captured by the gifted eye of cinematographer
Pasqualino De Santi who was awarded an Oscar for his efforts on the project.
Clearly, the ocular accoutrements of this particular production are as
essential to its success as the words of Shakespeare himself.
The scene at the ball
in which the two young lovers first meet is beautiful and touching. Zeffirelli
takes what might have been a liability, namely, the actors’ inexperience in
front of the camera, and turns it into one of the movie’s greatest assets. He
took enormous pains with Hussey and Whiting, preparing them carefully for each
scene, patiently rehearsing their lines and marks and creating a comfort zone
around them. He smartly focuses on their faces, their physical beauty and
artless innocence and charm. Never in the history of a major film had anyone
their age played these roles (both were in their teens). The result is both
utterly charming and convincing. Romeo and Juliet were themselves, after all,
just kids. Tossed in the middle of all this picturesque activity and serving as
a harbinger of darker things to come, is a haunting musical interlude with a
young man singing about the transitory nature of life, be it a bright red rose
or the face of a beautiful young maiden. Once he has us in his grip, Zeffirelli
never lets go, squeezing every ounce of emotion and pathos he can from each
succeeding scene. The story moves on from here to its familiar tragic end, with
the now secretly married young couple taking their lives and being buried side
by side; a judgment and curse upon all those who allow hate to blind them to
reason and love. The magnificently dolorous voice of Olivier ends the tale: “A glooming peace this morning with it brings. The sun for sorrow
will not show his head. For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet
and her Romeo.â€
Many critics praised the
film. Roger Ebert thought it delightful, calling it the best work of
Zeffirelli’s directorial career. It also had its notable detractors. The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael
prominently compared it to a clumsy high school production full of “weeping and
lamentation and carrying-on†but not much else. She and others scoffed at the
“bowdlerized†nature of the script, mocking it by calling it “Shakespeare liteâ€
and little more than a piece of pop culture confectionery pretending to be art.
While some of these criticisms may have had some merit, they failed to capture
the real reasons why the movie was such a huge international hit. Here for the
first time was a Shakespearean story that was both accessible and appealing to
a mass audience. Maybe it wasn’t The Bard of Avon in the strictest sense, but
it did retain much of the richness of the original story, including the language,
along with what Ebert described as “the
violence, the poetry, the love and the tragedy†that makes Shakespeare,
Shakespeare.
In all honesty, I
left the movie theater that night a little shaken up. I knew I had seen
something special. Through the magic of cinema, I had been allowed to enter
another realm if only for a moment, one completely foreign to mine, yet oddly familiar. The desire of the young to throw off adult authority,
to fly in the face of rules, to love recklessly and cast one’s fortunes to the
wind. In short, like Romeo, to roar at the gods: “Is it e'en so? Then
I defy you, stars!â€
It was all there. To see this film
as an adult versus seeing it when young, especially before violence and sex
became gratuitous cinematic staples, was a different experience altogether. I imagine millions of others my age felt this too. Though they wore different clothes and used different words,
these were people I could understand. They were like us. On top of that, I had also fallen in
love with Juliet, or Olivia Hussey, both of whom for me were now a part of each
other forever. For me and many others, this Romeo
and Juliet would be the one we would remember and love for the rest of our
lives.