New Movies: Virtuoso in Verona

If this Romeo and Juliet had been produced in 1956, there might have been no need for West Side Story the following year. “I wanted to bring the story to the attention of young people,” says Director Franco Zeffirelli. “The story is of two urchins crushed by a stupid, banal quarrel with origins even the adults don’t know. In love the young couple found an ideal — one they could die for — and youth today is hungry for ideals.”

They are not hungry for Shakespeare, but Zeffireli’s Romeo and Juliet will surely do much to reawaken a youthful identification with the aristocratic “star-crossed lovers” who have been so long in the limbo of Required Reading. This is one of the handful of classic Shakespearean films; it ranks lower than the Olivier Henry V, but only because of the substance, not the direction. With a charged, witty camera, Zeffirelli has managed to make the play alive and wholly contemporary without having had to transfer the action to a modern setting. Romeo and Juliet appear afresh as two incredibly articulate but believably, agonized teen-agers whose turf happens to be Quattrocento Verona. Too young to buck the Establishment—the Italian city-state with its machinery of epic feuds and rituals—they are finally undone by their passions. Death enlarges them when they abolish their parents’ hate. They become, as Juliet’s father puts it in the play’s epilogue, “the poor sacrifices of our enmity.”

Instead of simply duplicating the first-folio on film, Zeffirelli and his two co-writers, Franco Brusati and Masolino d’Amico, have blithely excised and elided speeches, transposed lines, eliminated characters. It is a dangerous game, rewriting Shakespeare, but Romeo and Juliet proves that it can be played and won. An even greater risk was to give the leading roles to a pair of youthful unknowns with virtually no acting experience: Juliet is a tremulous 16-year-old, Olivia Hussey; Romeo is Leonard Whiting, 17. Both look their parts and read their lines with a sensitivity far beyond the limitations of their age.

Equally impressive is John McEnery, 25, who plays Mercutio not as a witty, lascivious buffoon but as a possessed genius who has lounged too long with his inferiors. His delivery of the Queen Mab speech is a masterpiece of abstracted art. Teetering on madness, he spouts the words as if emerging from a lifelong nightmare. Zeffirelli, however, seems to have had better luck in casting youth than age. Pat Heywood’s Nurse is a cockney caricature. And Milo O’Shea’s Friar Laurence is a characterization lost somewhere in the middle distance, not deeply enough involved with the lovers nor sufficiently removed to act as a chorus of comment.

As in his The Taming of the Shrew, starring the Burtons, Zeffirelli dazzles the eye with a virtuoso use of color. His camera is a Renaissance palette. Courtiers stride by in the muted gold and crimsons of Piero della Francesca; cobblestones and horsemen diminish into the serene infinities of Uccello. Visually, Shakespeare has never been better realized—and seldom has he had so sensitive a collaborator.

Director, writer, scene designer and onetime actor, Franco Zeffirelli talks and acts like a mountebank, but he is a man of considerable talent and great versatility. “I am,” he declares grandly, “the flag-bearer of the crusade against boredom, bad taste and stupidity in the theater.”

That crusade originated in Florence, where Zeffirelli was born 44 years ago. The illegitimate son of a textile salesman and a seamstress, he grew up, he recalls, “amongst dresses and dressmakers.” At nine, he was taken to see Wagner’s Walküre—and got lost onstage after the performance. In a sense, he has been swallowed up in scenery ever since his one-man student production at the University of Florence led Luchino Visconti to sign him for a bit part in Crime and Punishment. Zeffirelli then talked his way into assistant directorships with the maestros of postwar Italian cinema: Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini.

Zeffirelli’s reputation was established at La Scala in Milan, where in 1954 he designed the costumes and sets for, and staged a production of Rossini’s La Cenerentola. It was the beginning of the Zeffirelli style—the flamboyant baroque settings, the epic brio that could turn a war horse into a steeplechaser. Although triumphant in opera, he has been somewhat less successful on the dramatic stage. His incoherent Othello was throttled by reviewers at Stratford-on-Avon. After seeing Zeffirelli’s Broadway production of The Lady of the Camellias, TIME’s critic called him “a director who needs a director.” Even the movie of Romeo and Juliet will not please everybody, since it clearly reflects Zeffirelli’s idiosyncratic opinions of Shakespeare. “Mercutio,” he insists, “is a self-portrait of Shakespeare himself, and a homosexual.”

Adverse criticism has so far not inhibited Zeffirelli’s energy, esteem or income. His salary for Romeo and Juliet was $50,000 plus a hefty percentage, and he will make even more from his new projects, notably a movie of Brecht’s Galileo, starring Rod Steiger. At his bachelor villa near Rome, Zeffirelli remains the low-pressure gran signore, entertaining ten or twelve friends for lunch, inhaling gusts of Winston smoke from fingertip-held cigarettes. His braggadocio extends even to his genealogy. “One day my father showed up with an armful of documents,” he recalls. “He finally had documented proof of my origins. I told myself that it really wasn’t so bad being a bastard now that I knew I was descended from one of the world’s most celebrated bastards —Leonardo da Vinci.”