Romeo And Juliet [Sensormatic]

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Is it or isn't it? The best screen adaptation ever of a Shakespeare play, I mean. The answer is obviously open to debate, but thanks to English teachers everywhere Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 production of "Romeo and Juliet" is surely the most popular Shakespeare ever filmed. Not only was the movie a box office hit, it has been shown to probably every student who has ever graduated from high school in the last three decades. I saw it only once in widescreen when it first came out and subsequently about fifty times in pan-and-scan while showing it to my freshman classes over the years. So you can imagine my delight in Paramount's new widescreen DVD transfer.

Shakespeare purists may object to Zeffirelli's manner of adapting plays to the screen, but it's certainly hard to argue with the commercial success of his three movie ventures, "The Taming of the Shrew" in 1967, "Hamlet" in 1990, and "Romeo and Juliet." They are among the most appealing Shakespeare ever presented in the cinema and among the most accessible to the general public. I think the Bard would have been proud.

So, how does Zeffirelli do it? First, he judiciously (and in some cases, mercilessly) cuts the poet's longer orations. Nothing the casual Shakespeare viewer would remember is excised, mind you, just parts of the longer speeches. Still, this means the friar, the nurse, and Mercutio have much of their material removed; cynics would argue that most of their discourses are long-winded, anyway. But cutting Shakespeare has been a tradition in motion pictures long before Zeffirelli. What does this director do differently? He substitutes for the missing words a good deal of self-explanatory action. During the opening scene, for instance, and later during the encounters between Mercutio and Tybalt and Romeo and Tybalt where the stage directions say "They fight," Zeffirelli has them fight and fight and fight some more. It makes the play as visual as it is verbal and has the added benefit of making the plot easier to follow.

Second, Zeffirelli is a master at casting. When his first Shakespeare film, "The Taming of the Shrew," called for a bickering couple, he got Hollywood's most famous bickering couple, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, to play the leads. They were inspired. When the director needed a strong, popular actor for "Hamlet," he got Hollywood's strongest, most popular man for the job, Mel Gibson. Gibson did not embarrass himself. For "Romeo and Juliet," Zeffirelli did something no production before or since has done: He cast two youthful teenagers in the lead roles. In the play, Juliet is described as having "...not seen the change of fourteen years." Olivia Hussey was about fifteen when she played the part. Romeo's age is never revealed in the play, but we get the impression that he is also in his mid teens. Juliet's father says of Romeo that "Verona brags of him to be a virtuous and well-govern'd youth." Leonard Whiting was about seventeen when he did the part. These star-crossed lovers are the very picture of impetuous adolescence, and they help to create a movie that is as vigorous as it is lyrical. The two leads may not enunciate their lines in the best Shakespearean tradition, but they have the virtue of appearing genuine. When the tragedy sets in and the two youngsters are reduced to "Blubb'ring and weeping, weeping and blubbering," they are behaving in a mode consistent with their innocence and immaturity.

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