By Raymond Benson

One of the most talked-about and popular films of 1968 was Franco Zeffirelli’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Audiences in the UK were treated to the film early in the year (March), but the release date in the USA was held back to October. By then, the picture was a worldwide phenomenon. Nino Rota’s theme song (known in various markets as “Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet,” “A Time for Us,” and “What is a Youth?”) had been covered by numerous musical artists and was already a standard on the radio and other media.

A British-Italian co-production, the picture’s creative team consisted of mostly Italians, while the production/financing and actors hailed largely from Britain (with some Italian actors being dubbed into English). Director Zeffirelli had already enjoyed some success with his earlier Shakespearean adaptation, The Taming of the Shrew (1967, with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton). It made box-office sense for the filmmaker to go a step further and bring more Shakespeare to the masses.

Zeffirelli made a canny decision to cast two young actors who were the same ages of the characters in the play. Productions of Romeo and Juliet in the past had always cast actors who were well into their thirties and beyond (the most notable being the 1936 George Cukor-helmed picture featuring Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer). Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey were 16 and 15, respectively, when they were cast, and 17 and 16 during filming. Not only were the two stars extremely attractive and likable, they were also competent and charismatic performers as well.

The film captured the zeitgeist of 1968—an era of youth rebellion, “free love,” and pushing the envelope in the arts. There was much ado of how Zeffirelli and his co-screenwriters (Franco Brusati and Masolino D’Amico) cut massive portions from Shakespeare’s text in order to release a movie that ran a little over two hours (and with an intermission, too, to mimic the experience of a stage play). Schools in America organized field trips to see the film, because for once, Shakespeare had been made “commercial.” Some markets, however, made cuts in the film to eliminate the brief nudity in the bedroom scene. This reviewer recalls that in West Texas, two different versions of the film played. The picture was released prior to the creation of the movie ratings system in America, but by the time it ran in West Texas, the ratings were in effect. The cinema where Romeo and Juliet was shown in late 1968 or early 1969 arbitrarily exhibited a censored “M” (for Mature Audiences) rated version during matinees, and an “R” (for Restricted Audiences) version in the evenings. All this seems rather silly in retrospect, because the film is, at worst, a “PG” in today’s rating sensibilities.

Filmed on location in Italy, the movie is gorgeous to look at (with Oscar winning cinematography and costumes by Pasqualino De Santis and Danilo Donati, respectively). As mentioned previously, the now classic score by Nino Rota had a great deal to do with the movie’s success. One must give Zeffirelli his due, though (he was nominated for Best Director but didn’t win). His direction of the film is superb, not only in guiding his two young stars into intense, utterly believable performances, but especially in the street brawls and sword fighting scenes. The sequence in which Romeo and Tybalt (Michael York) have at it is appropriately awkward, messy, and realistically choreographed.

The Criterion Collection has released a lovely Blu-ray disk (the first time in the USA and UK for a Blu-ray, although the film has been available on a Paramount DVD for years). The 4K digital restoration, with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack, looks magnificent with its expected 1960s-era film stock appearance. Supplements include an excerpt from a 2018 documentary on Zeffirelli, and interviews with stars Whiting and Hussey from 1967 after filming was complete and in 2016 at a retrospective screening.

Whiting and Hussey have recently made the news by filing a lawsuit against the studio for allegedly being pushed by Zeffirelli (now deceased) into doing the brief nudity. Interestingly, in the 2016 interview on the disk, they joke about the bedroom scene as “being fun” and there are interviews with the couple in recent years in which they defend the nude scenes as appropriate to the material. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out in the legal proceedings.

Regardless, Criterion’s release of Romeo and Juliet on Blu-ray is a landmark presentation of a classic, beloved motion picture. It is perhaps the definitive adaptation of Shakespeare’s play on film, and the disk is highly recommended for fans of the Bard, the play itself, Nino Rota’s music, Zeffirelli, and the two stars who light up the screen. As Romeo says of Juliet, “O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright.” They both do.

Click here to order from Amazon