Page 61 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

50 I Shakespeare in the Movies

Castellani represented a new post-Olivier wave, not only employ-
ing the camera to translate a play into pure cinema but subverting
Shakespeare's texts to the tenets of moviemaking as well. The effect
was of seeing Shakespeare, not unlike some beautiful butterfly pre-
served under glass, tastefully immortalized for all time, with the life
force pressed out. So Castellani felt free to drastically cut the origi-
nal. Missing were memorable lines in the balcony scene, almost all
the low-comedy relief (particularly Peter and the Nurse), as well as
the Queen Mab dream speech, Mercutio himself reduced from
Hamlet-like pre-existential voice to bit player. With the apothecary
gone, Romeo stabbed himself rather than accomplish the deed with
poison.
Likewise, the director liberally added material, including a scene
that explains why Friar John fails to deliver an all-important message
to banished Romeo. "We had come to see a play," Robert Hatch
wryly commented in the Nation. "Perhaps we should not complain
that we were shown a sumptuous travelogue." The film, lauded in
Italy (winning the Golden Eagle of St. Mark, Grand Prize at the
Venice Film Festival, where the audience delighted in gorgeous
panoramas of their country) was scorned in England. British theater
critics savagely attacked not only the sparsity of dialogue but also
the throwaway approach taken toward surviving lines. Is Castellani's
Romeo and Juliet a masterpiece or a mess?
In its defense, the director perceived himself not as interpreter of
Shakespeare, akin to a live-theater director, but as an auteur: the pri-
mary artist, freely adapting the play to his own medium, much as
Shakespeare felt free to transform a preexisting Italian novelle into
an Elizabethan play—taking from the tale what he needed, shaping
it as he saw fit, and discarding all else. Castellani did to Shakespeare
what Verdi had done when borrowing the plot of Othello to create
his opera Otello. He created a unique and viable work. Moira Walsh
of America defended the Romeo and Juliet film as "a work of art
which is unified, genuinely cinematic and, even more than [Olivier's]
Henry V, bears the mark of a single creative talent at work."
Conversely, those who attack it contend that Shakespeare is not
some minor storyteller but the greatest playwright ever. Shake-
speare's sources, rough and crude, begged for a great artist to improve
on them. Shakespeare's play is a finished work, deserving the respect
due a masterpiece. The filmmaker, working in an essentially dra-
matic medium (retaining Shakespeare's words, as Verdi did not), has
a responsibility to respect the original's integrity. "Castellani's Romeo