I can tell her age unto an hour

The Verona project, part I

Who (how old), when, how long? Leslie Howard (42 [!!]) and Norma Shearer (33 [!]), 1936, 2hr. Juliet's age is, mercifully, not specified. Directed by George Cukor (36).

What sort of R&J? Shearer desperately tries to be girlish; Howard is, of course, girlish without even trying. It's hard to imagine how anyone thought this could be a good idea, but to their credit, they're both game. Juliet's headstrong and horny character is played down a bit, probably in service of Shearer's youth simulation, the one major exception being in the morning-after nightingale/lark sequence, when she breathily makes it clear that she wants more.

Seriocomic scale for first scene? At least a 7, as people actually seem to die in the melee (though no one identifiable, so it doesn't affect the official body count). The silliness is supplied by Andy Devine, who plays his usual goofy cowboy as Peter, servant to Juliet's Nurse. That character isn't in this scene in the play, so he stands in for Sampson to deliver the thumb-biting lines of that Capulet servant. (Very little of that opening dialogue survives.) Devine also stands in later for the unnamed illiterate servant sent to deliver Capulet's invitations to the masque (a list which, bizarrely, includes Mercutio [later: duh, that's not bizarre but simply textual: I forget that Mercutio is not Romeo's kinsman but the Prince's {as is Paris}]).

"Wherefore": do the filmmakers know what it means? The evidence is not at all conclusive.

Carrion flies? Nope.

Body count? 5 of 6: Lady M survives. Mercutio and Tybalt, incidentally, are played by John Barrymore (age 53) and Basil Rathbone (43), respectively, so we get some good swashbuckling in their duel. Barrymore also delivers the Queen Mab speech beautifully--in a single take! One suspects it wasn't the first time he'd done it.

What (else) is missing? Most notable to me are Juliet's wonderful double entendres in III.v when she seems to be telling her mother that she'd like to get her hands on Romeo to avenge Tybalt's death but what she's really saying is that she'd just like to get her hands on Romeo again. Also, when Romeo threatens suicide, Friar Laurence's scolding of him becomes politically correct: in the play he chides him as womanly and bestial, but here he calls him only an animal.

What (else) is changed? Easily the weirdest change is that Friar John, dispatched by Laurence with the crucial message to Romeo, telling him that Juliet's death has been faked, is actually shown stopping to give succor to a sick person and then being locked into the plague house; he even calls for help as Romeo's servant Balthasar rides past carrying R's letter to J. In the play, of course, John simply tells Laurence how his mission went awry.

What (else) is odd? After the wedding, a weird pullback from Juliet's balcony, then a cut to doomed Mercutio in the piazza. For the postslaughter wedding night, several sexual ecstasy clichés: swelling music, a sky full of stars, an orchard full of phallic trees. Then cut to the chamber, where they're ostensibly in full embrace--except that, the Hays Office calling the shots, Romeo has both feet on the floor. (On the other hand, a genuinely surprising amount of the play's bawdy language survives--the Hays folks must have thought "prick" couldn't really mean what they thought it meant.) Oh: and J's waking in the crypt plays as distinctly Bride of Frankenstein.

End-of-the-play exposition? No: cut from crypt to Capulet and (unwidowded) Montague reconciling before the Prince.

Overall, better than I expected, but far from great--there's very little that's special to balance the grotesquerie of the overaged casting. The masque has some interesting moments, though: an amusing "joust" between "horsemen," and then later, when J is supposed to be dancing w/ Paris, she keeps getting distracted by the new dude she's seen, and Paris has to keep leading her back. It's one of the few moments of convincing romantic transport in one of the title characters.

There are also a couple of nice shots, most notably when the Nurse is walking Juliet down the hallway to her chamber after the masque, and as they proceed, a servant comes just behind them, snuffing the candles in the hall. Poignant imagery for the quintessential snuff romance.

And lest I forget (as in fact I almost did): most surprising name in the credits? As "literary consultant," William Strunk--right, as in The Elements of Style.

Oh, and a word about the DVD. It has become commonplace to include a contemporary short and a cartoon on the DVD of a film from this era. My experience is that usually the cartoon is a hoot and the short is simply hootable. Here, though, the cartoon, "Little Cheeser," about a juvenile mouse who wants to be a tough guy, is 7 minutes or so of treacle until finally, in the last couple of minutes, we get some wonderfully surreal action. But the live-action one-reeler, "Master Will Shakespeare," is a one-reel biopic with an astonishing amount of actual nonbullshit information--and it's directed by a name that surprised me even more than Strunk's: Jacques Tourneur, younger than either of the feature's stars, and with Out of the Past and all those wonderful Val Lewton films far in his future.