Page 60 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

Star-Crossed Lovers I 49

films of Nelson Algren's Walk on the Wild Side and Tennessee
Williams's Summer and Smoke. He would be replaced in both pro-
jects by Britain's Laurence Harvey; it made sense, then, that Harvey
was the actor of choice for a mid-fifties Romeo and Juliet.
The 1954 Romeo and Juliet was hailed as the first to feature
actors who approximated the characters' ages. Harvey was twenty-
five at the time; costar Susan Shentall, nineteen. Also acclaimed was
the breathtaking color photography and stunningly capturing Italian
locales. This was the dream project of Renato Castellani, who made
his reputation directing Two Cents Worth of Hope, a transitional
film between the fading postwar neorealist style and emerging films
about troubled teens. After attending a revival of Cukor's .Romeo
and Juliet, Castellani exited the theater in anguish over the specta-
cle of middle-aged actors incarnating teenagers on faux fifteenth-cen-
tury sets. Then the concept hit him: Since he was searching for a
project, why not Romeo and Juliet? The Italian director found a
financial backer in England's J. Arthur Rank, veteran of Olivier's
three Shakespearean adaptations, leading to one of the many inter-
national coproductions so popular then.
Robert Krasker, who sumptuously shot Henry V for Olivier, was
engaged as cinematographer. Closely collaborating with Castellani,
Krasker captured diverse locations as breathtaking tableaus, each
purposefully shot in the distinct style of some Renaissance master
whose approach was appropriate for the content of any individual
shot, such as Vermeer's astounding light-and-shadow effects, Filippo
Lippi's uncanny feel for embellished detail, Carpaccio's intellectual-
ized concept of color, Pisanello's compositional eloquence, Lorenzo
Monaco's lyricism, and for shots that linger on Shentall's beauty,
Veneziano's adoration of the female form.
Castellani early on abandoned his initial concept of shooting
entirely in Verona for authenticity. Some spots alluded to in Shake-
speare's play remained intact; others, sadly, did not. The director was
seized with a new inspiration: Travel across Italy, find various places
untouched by time, shoot the film with a broader notion of "on loca-
tion." All in all, ten Italian cities provided well-preserved locales.
What emerged was a quintessential distillation of High Renais-
sance style, offering an entire era as immortalized in its art and
architecture. Such an approach could be called self-consciously dec-
orative. As Walter Goodman pointed out in the New Republic, "The
play is not the thing . . . his best tool [is] the camera, his goal the
visual image."