To round out my Fall 2024 wanderings through Shakespeare, I watched Franco Zeffirelli's classic Romeo and Juliet. It was very good and I have some thoughts. (Shocking, I know.)
My previous Shakespeare pieces:
Romeo and Juliet:
Macbeth:
Summary
Romeo and Juliet is a 1968 film directed by Italian filmmaker Franco Zeffirelli and co-written by Zeffirelli, Franco Brusati, and Masolino D'Amico. It was shot in Italy and it stars Olivia Hussey (Juliet), Leonard Whiting (Romeo), Michael York (Tybalt), John McEnery (Mercutio), and Milo O'Shea (Friar Lawrence) as principals.
It was well received, winning Oscars for Best Cinematography and Best Costume Design, and scoring nominations for Best Picture and Best Director. Basically everyone I asked watched this film in high school.
I already talked a lot about the play at the start of my Romeo + Juliet piece, so I won't belabor it here. Check that piece out if you're curious or want a refresher on the plot and some background on the play itself.
This version is set sometime during the Italian Renaissance (14th-16th Century), the tail end of which overlaps with Shakespeare (1564-1616). It's not heavily stylized or stage-y. it's shot like a "regular' film and is a pretty straight up version of the play..
The Acting
Overall I thought the performances in this were really good, from top to bottom. Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting were both excellent in their first major film roles. (Hussey was 16 during filming and Whiting 17). Honorable mention to Michael York, John McEnery, and Milo O'Shea. So you know, basically all of the principle cast.
I really, really liked Hussey as Juliet and I feel like she conveyed Juliet's turn from dutiful daughter to determined woman very well. Even in her first scene where she's deferential to her mother about Paris, she has the slightest glint in her eye and gives the briefest conspiratorial glance at her Nurse when she deflects with "I'll look to like, if looking liking move." It's a small tell that reveals the cleverness and diplomatic skill she will reveal as the story goes on.
She even somehow reads as older later in the film, just on the strength of will Hussey conveys. You can see her subtly collect and steel herself after the Nurse betrays her in saying she should just marry Paris.
I also really liked the moment in the balcony scene when she's playfully sparring with Romeo where she almost smirks while telling him "O, swear not by the moon, th' inconstant moon, / That monthly changes in her circled orb." It's like she has immediately pegged him as someone who may have been prone to over the top nonsense and she's giving him some shit about it.
I thought Whiting was really good as well but fewer obvious acting moments leap to mind, probably for a reason I'm about to get to.
The Characters
Juliet and Romeo
This film is sort of the opposite of Romeo + Juliet in that it actually biases more towards Juliet, which I think is why Hussey's performance sticks in my memory better. Almost all of Romeo's lines before the party have been excised which means we get a stronger sense of her character than his before they meet and this film retained a lot of her later lines that Romeo + Juliet cut, which preserves an idea I talked about in my Romeo + Juliet piece:
...Marc Conner, in his Teaching Company course How to Read and Understand Shakespeare, argues that Romeo is not the tragic hero of the play; Juliet is. Once the spell of Rosaline is broken, Romeo is largely static where Juliet develops as a character going from an obedient child to a smart and determined adult more in control of herself than her new husband is.
I thought all of Romeo and Juliet's scenes together were fantastic. (It's Romeo and Juliet so they only have like 4, but still.) Hussey and Whiting sold both the immediate fascination and mixed the youthful enthusiasm of young love with a more adult sense of true bonding. This Romeo and Juliet felt like they knew and liked each other, rather than just being infatuated.
The production did some small things to help reinforce this feeling, too. During the balcony scene just as they vow their love to one another, Juliet purposefully extends her hand and they touch palms, harkening back to their "palm to palm is holy palmer's kiss" meeting. This is a really small thing, but it makes it feel like they already have a shared private language, and it makes them seem closer.
The timeline of the balcony scene is also fuzzier, as it's broken up by a pan up to the trees and a fade before a rooster crows and we return to the scene where they then say goodbye. It indicates that they've spent all night talking and I like that we aren't privy to everything they've said to each other. It makes them feel like they exist outside of the scenes they're in and blunts some of the "so, this is going SUPER fast" cynicism that comes when we've literally seen their entire relationship.
Also, the wedding scene maintained the "this could really easily have been a comedy" feel of the play. Whiting's nervous and wordless anxiousness while he waited for Juliet was great and well acted. And Juliet barreling in, barely stopping to do the most perfunctory crossing of herself before running to Romeo was legitimately funny. I liked how the scene was blocked too, with Lawrence deliberately standing between them while they craned their necks to look around him at each other. Both Whiting and Hussey's performance here was delightfully impatient as Friar Lawrence took his sweet ass time performing the service.
Tybalt and Mercutio
Michael York's Tybalt is hotheaded but not actually that villainous. I liked how the film cut back to him several times watching Romeo and Juliet dance at the Capulet party. It made him come across more as a concerned cousin than a guy just looking to kill people. Juliet is 14 after all and an enemy of the family is trying to put the moves on her.
John McEnery's Mercutio is fun and charismatic but also has a sublimated darkness in him, which comes out during his Queen Mab speech, where there is an emotional inflection point after he describes how:
Sometime she driveth o’er a soldier’s neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five fathom deep, and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes
And, being thus frighted, swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again
Mercutio's entire mood changes here, like something has bubbled up or he's accidentally dredged up something in himself he wishes he'd left buried. Maybe he was a soldier himself? It's not obviously relevant to anything but it gives him an inner world which, again, makes him feel like he exists outside of the scenes he's in.
He's also kind of a dick, which is definitely a supported read of the play text. His messing with the Nurse takes on kind of a nasty edge, especially when she clearly isn't amused and thinks it's not exactly all in good fun.
Tybalt and Mercutio's pivotal Act 3 scene 1 confrontation is worth some examination in detail, which I'll get to later, but for now suffice it to say that it was really interesting and well played by both actors.
Father Lawrence
Milo O'Shea's Friar Lawrence is a fun pugnacious take on the character. He's really no nonsense and very much not having Romeo's bullshit when he first appears. I liked how Lawrence is completely dismissive of Romeo's new determination to marry Juliet but then has a long pause where he realizes it could end the feud. I like how O'Shea played that pause; he may not believe Romeo has found his true love and he may not even care all that much. But some good could come of this.
This Friar is rather forceful and really takes no crap from anyone. When Romeo is having his post exile freakout, Lawrence just smacks him. (Romeo's dialog in this scene is heavily cut. Maybe Lawrence slapped the blank verse right out of him?)
There's a good moment when Juliet visits the Friar after she learns of her impending marriage to Paris where Lawrence sees the medicinal flowers on his desk and you can see the idea for the sleeping potion come to him. (O'Shea is really good here; it's like you can see his wheels turning.) The way this is framed makes his plan feel like a desperate improvised gamble, rather than a weirdly elaborate plot he had ready made just in case this particular situation came up.
There's also a nice small moment where Lawrence briefly smiles at Juliet's funeral before realizing he shouldn't. This production in general is full of these small details that really aid the story.
In this version, like in Romeo + Juliet, Romeo's servant Balthasar sees Juliet's funeral and runs to tell Romeo, but this production was wise enough to not have Lawrence see him. (Recall that in Romeo + Juliet, Balthasar makes a big dramatic entrance and Lawrence looks right at him and then does not react at all to him running off, either in the moment or apparently after the fact. It's a big dramatic visual, but it makes Lawrence look like a complete idiot.)
Some Small stuff
There's definitely some subtext that Old Capulet and Lady Capulet's relationship is quietly strained. There's this sort of coiled tension between them. The reason isn't ever made clear and it isn't really relevant to anything but these little touches make them feel like real people.
Benvolio is massively deemphasized in this film, being basically a glorified extra. His absence doesn't really stick out in a dramatic sense. If you know the play decently well you might intellectually notice he's not really present, but the story doesn't particularly suffer for it. He doesn't have a whole lot to do after Act 1 in the play text anyway.
"Wilt thou walk?" - Act 3 Scene 1
As I mentioned earlier, this film's Act 3 scene 1, the scene that sets the tragedy in motion, was really interesting. It begins as normal, with Mercutio and Benvolio in a piazza on a very hot day being approached by Tybalt who is looking to challenge Romeo to a duel.
Mercutio, sitting in the fountain to cool off, throws some verbal jabs at Tybalt who doesn't pay him much mind. When Romeo appears and Tybalt challenges him, Romeo tries to placate him with:
I do protest I never injured thee
But love thee better than thou canst devise
Till thou shalt know the reason of my love.
And so, good Capulet, which name I tender
As dearly as mine own, be satisfied.
He then shakes Tybalt's hand.
What I think is cool here, is that none of the characters really know what to make of this odd reaction, and seem to think Romeo is mocking Tybalt. Which of course he isn't. Tybalt responds by holding out the hand Romeo touched, smelling it and making a big show of disgust before washing his hand off in the fountain where Mercutio is sitting. Tybalt laughs at them, splashes Mercutio, and then turns to leave.
Mercutio then draws on him which brings Tybalt back. So in this version the confrontation that dooms everyone is pretty clearly Mercutio's fault. Tybalt was leaving, and seemed content with publicly insulting Romeo. This is in contrast to Romeo + Juliet where Tybalt beating Romeo to a pulp triggers Mercutio's intervention. Neither setup is better than the other, I just think it's neat how differently the two films handled it.
The duel itself is interesting too, as both Mercutio and Tybalt are kind of just f*cking around. They don't seem to be seriously trying to hurt each other. At one point Tybalt disarms Mercutio and then after a moment of holding his sword to the man's chest, gives Mercutio his weapon back, And when Romeo first gets in between them, they seem equally annoyed and both point their swords at him while tut-tutting. They then nod to each other in a commiserating, "after you, sir" kind of way.
When Tybalt later stabs Mercutio under the arm of the again interfering Romeo, he looks really shocked and nonplussed. It was absolutely an accident. And no one realizes how hurt Mercutio actually is. The Capulets leave and the Montagues think he's joking when he says "Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch. Marry, ’tis enough. Where is my page? Go, villain, fetch a surgeon."
The second time he says "A plague on both your houses" is when they start to realize something is actually wrong and then he suddenly dies. Romeo chases down Tybalt and their confrontation is extremely different than the preceding one. That was a sporting duel, this is a fight.
Tybalt sees very quickly that Romeo is trying to kill him and he reacts in kind. This fight is much more violent and chaotic, with them chasing each other through the streets, making wild and vicious swings, and rolling around on the ground while whaling on each other.
I absolutely loved this scene. There's great acting and great visual storytelling through blocking, choreography, and editing.
The Ending
This film made some changes to the ending. The scene with Romeo and Balthasar is cut down quite a bit, and Whiting's performance isn't nearly as melodramatic as DiCaprio's in Romeo + Juliet. Like in that film, this one also cuts the plague as the reason Lawrence's messenger couldn't get to Mantua to tell Romeo the plan. In this, Romeo and Balthasar, horses running full tilt, ride right by Lawrence's messenger without seeing him.
As with Romeo + Juliet, Romeo doesn't kill Paris and this injects a little bit of wonk to the ending, though not the same kind of wonk that it did in Luhrmann's film.
Other than not meeting Paris, the ending plays out like it does in the play text, and this is what causes some issues. Lawrence tells Juliet after she wakes up that the watch is coming and he can't be found there, but....why? Why is the watch even coming? In the play Paris's page runs to get the watch when Paris tries to apprehend Romeo, but none of that happened in this version.
Per wikipedia, citing Glenn Loney's Staging Shakespeare – Seminars on Production Problems, the confrontation between Paris and Romeo was filmed, but cut in the edit, which explains the weirdness. Fixing the wonk after they decided to cut the scene would have required excising and / or reshooting even more scenes that were already filmed. Apparently Zeffirelli cut the scene because he didn't want to make Romeo unsympathetic which he definitely avoided, but at the cost of a plot hole or two.
It's not a big thing, but it stands out to me as really the only stumble in the film.
Gallimaufry
- I liked Hussey's delivery when she says in the balcony scene:
Or, if thou thinkest I am too quickly won,
I’ll frown and be perverse and say thee nay,
So thou wilt woo, but else not for the world.
This line would work delivered totally straight, but I liked that in this version, Juliet is clearly poking fun at the artifice of the Courtly Love courtship conventions, and the general societal conventions, that dictate a woman isn't allowed to actually desire someone but must always be chaste and demure.
- This film cut Juliet's line after their wedding night:
O God, I have an ill-divining soul!
Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low,
As one dead in the bottom of a tomb.
Either my eyesight fails or thou lookest pale.
I don't mind this as the speech is a bit redundant. Like, yeah, we know we heard the prologue.
- Apparently this film was shot entirely MOS (i.e. without sound) and then the actors had to go back and dub all of their lines. (Spaghetti Westerns often did this, too) As is probably clear from how I phrased that, I didn't actually notice while I was watching it. So, in short, everybody did a really good job dubbing.
Side note: In film, MOS is "mit-out-sound" which, potentially apocryphally, comes from a malapropism a German director said to an American crew. ("mit" is "with" in German) True story or not, Mit-out-sound is the etymology film people use.
And in an autobiographical aside, MOS caused some confusion for me and my friend Becka when we visited Vienna many years ago. She was a film major at FSU and I had helped a friend at U Miami shoot his senior film project, so we both independently had mit-out-sound in our lexicon. On about day 4 of our trip we were talking about how neither of us ever seemed to be able to get the still water (rather than seltzer) we had been trying to order. We then realized we had both been saying "mit out gas" to all the clerks who all assumed we were just mangling "mit gas" (i.e. "with bubbles'). The actual German word for "without" is "ohne" and, shockingly, once we started actually using the right word, we started to get what we ordered.
It was rather funny that we had both been independently making the same weird mistake for 4 days.
- This is maybe only tangentially related to this production, but Dante makes the first reference, in a book anyway, to the feuding Montagues and Capulets in his Divine Comedy. (Purgatorio Canto 6) He uses their Italian names Montecchi and Cappelletti. There seems to be some debate as to whether Montecchi and Cappelletti were actual family names or nicknames for a political faction. (Italian history at this time was absolutely headache inducing; if i never hear the word "Guelph" or "Ghibelline" again I'll be very happy. Though I do appreciate that they had The War of the Bucket, which is objectively a funny name.)
Dante wrote the Divine Comedy in the Early 1300s and I found one statement on a Verona tourism site that says the Montagues were banished from Verona after a coup attempt in 1325. (I haven't found any other source for the latter statement.) All that to say, I wonder if Zeffirelli knew all that and the film is intended to be set in the early 1300s. I'm certainly no expert here, but the costumes and sets definitely seemed like they were from the early side of the Italian Renaissance.
- I liked how rigid and prescriptive the Renaissance dancing was at the party and how this confining formalism contrasted with the freeing passion that Romeo and Juliet were about to experience. It approximated an effect I described in my Romeo and Juliet ballet piece, where before she sees Romeo, Juliet's dancing is kind of stiff and unambitious but it immediately changes when they meet.
Conclusion
I really, really liked this film and I can see why apparently every high school English teacher uses it in class. It's my personal Gold Standard for Romeo and Juliet movies.
It's worth checking out. Also, it's very amusing to see Austin Powers's silly, bumbling boss as Tybalt.
-m
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