Give me, give me! O, tell me not of fear!

The Verona project, part VI

A number of things I hate about this inexplicably much-loved version:

1. The MUsic. Good christ, I don't know whether Nino Rota is to blame, but virtually all the music is too loud, too dramatic, too much. And when the masque grinds to a halt for a vocal of the love theme . . . yuck! The music swells at all the obvious moments: at the first kiss, e.g., and then enough to drown out "My only love, sprung from my only hate"--kinda important line, methinks.
2. The banishment of most of Shakespeare's comedy. Did Zeffirelli not notice that this is often a very funny play? Apparently so--I should check my post on his Hamlet . . . well, no, I don't seem to have said that it was humorless, but I also don't find any mention of any of the humor in that play. Part of the problem is that funny lines are simply cut--see remarks below about the opening scene, e.g. But part of it is that the "humor" that survives seems mostly frantically forced. It's fair to play Mercutio as manic-depressive, but if you play him as simply angry and humorless, you're not doing the play. Even the Queen Mab speech is angry. He gets a laugh or two before his fatal duel w/ Tybalt (an extraordinarily dull swordfight, by the way--and the comparative liveliness of the succeeding Tybalt-Romeo tilt suggests that John McEnery [Mercut.] simply couldn't handle a blade), but all the comedy of his death scene comes from precisely the tragic source: his friends' failure to recognize the gravity of his wounds; for his part, he is simply angry (though he pronounces "A plague on both your houses" only once--or at least three times fewer than Romeo calls himself fortune's fool after poking Tybalt [a grotesquely lush Michael York]) .
3. The pointless changes and omissions. Look, I don't think that every line is necessarily sacred, but why would you cut "It is the East, and Juliet is the sun"--half of what may be Shakespeare's most famous couplet ever? Is it so you can get more of that damned song in the previous scene? Why would you leave Rosaline unmentioned until Friar Laurence chides Romeo for his inconstancy, thus leaving the impression that pre-Juliet, Romeo has simply been in love with . . . love? (This is true, of course, but contrary to what any courtly lover would project--which is to say that his love for R may have been a complete sham, but he still needed a Rosaline as the receptor of his pro forma love rays.) When the Nurse brings tidings of the duel, why would you deny Juliet that excruciating moment of uncertainty about who exactly Nurse is describing as dead? And why would you deny her that moment of cursing her beloved husband before cursing herself for her curse? I mean, c'mon, Zeff: there are things that are important, dig?
4. The overacting, the underacting, the acting acting. There is one actor who pretty consistently merits the Bard's words, and that is the teenage Juliet, who is mostly at least good, and who, once Nurse turns on her, telling her that Romeo is as good as dead and she might as well marry Paris, turns the character into a remarkable independent feminist hero. It's in the text, but it's rarely played, and Zeffirelli deserves some credit for that. On the other hand, he deserves the blame, then, for not leading into that with that wonderful double-entendre banter with her mother at the start of the scene about wanting Romeo close at hand. That sequence--one of my favorites in the play, and one that sets the stage for her feminist rebirth--is cut altogether. Likewise, Friar Laurence offers the sleeping potion without any threat by J of suicide--and worse, she never has a moment of doubt about whether the potion is really a poison.

Who (how old), when, how long? Leonard Whiting (17) and Olivia Hussey (16), 1968, 2¼hrs. Whiting is not as bad as he seems likely to be at the start, when he often seems uncomprehending of his own lines, but he's mostly just a pretty boy.

What sort of R&J? They can't keep their hands and mouths off of each other! But again, this is sort of an easy '60s way to show what the language is perfectly capable of expressing without the over-the-top and culturally inappropriate physicality.

Seriocomic scale for first scene? See above re "lack of comedy": all of the comedy is cut or blunted in this scene, so I'd say 9.

"Wherefore": do the filmmakers know what it means? Absolutely: Hussey reads that sequence beautifully. She accents the second syllable of wherefore, e.g.: nonstandard, but legitimate in context.

Carrion flies? No: that scene is comically hacked, beginning w/ R blubbering on the floor. On the other hand, after Nurse arrives and Romeo feigns suicide, Friar Laurence not only calls him woman and animal but actually pops him one in the face.

Body count? 4: Paris (perhaps the most ludicrously vapid and effeminate Paris ever, incidentally) is a no-show at the crypt, and Lady M survives as well.

What (else) is missing? I've covered the worst. Romeo makes no on-screen trip to the apothecary, but I'd call that a fair omission.

What (else) is changed?

• Capulet calls to Peter when he wants to send his invitations (a conflation made in the Cukor version)--but the scene is cut before the servant arrives, making the text change pointless. Presumably an editing issue.
• When Capulet tells Tybalt to chill after the latter has recognized Romeo at the masque, Zeff bizarrely gives Lady C the lines "You are a princox, go / Be quiet," and even more bizarrely has her deliver them ironically, actually serving as an incitement to Tybalt. Then she continues the speech, but to her husband: "For shame! I'll make you quiet." There's no textual justification I know of for any of that.
• The Romeo-Nurse scene, in which they arrange the marriage logistics, ends in the church, with Romeo throwing a kiss to the icon of the crucified Christ.
• When Romeo leaves Juliet's balcony for the last time, she does not say "Methinks I see thee, now thou art below, / As one dead in the bottom of a tomb," but Hussey's eyes convey that sense beautifully for a moment. (Incidentally, when R rises from bed moments before that, his naked, back-to-the-camera stretch before the window struck me as the obvious source for a similar moment in Life of Brian.)
• OK, this is just sooooooo Hollywood: Friar Laurence sends Friar John with his message for Romeo about the death scam and the escape plan, but John gets locked in a plague house, right? No, in this version what happens is that he sets off on the world's slowest donkey, and when Romeo's servant Balthazar sees Juliet "dead," he hops on his horse and simply overtakes the slow-assed ass. If only Friar L had used DHL . . .

What (else) is odd? My favorite! Notice the head count above. And yet the Prince still says he has "lost a brace of kinsman." Uh, Zeff: "brace" means two, as in Mercutio and Paris. He's lost only one kinsman in this version, dude.

End-of-the-play exposition? Blessedly, no: just a double funeral procession and minimal scolding by the Prince.

Oh, there are some nice moments: Juliet's waking at the crypt is betokened by a close-up on her hand, first moving slightly, then gaining animation; sweet. But mostly it's just soggy, labored. And while this is probably not the fault of anyone on the film crew, the color is horribly muddy in the DVD version; if this is as good as so many deluded people consider it, it deserves a remastered DVD version. Just don't shop it to me.