Page 63 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

52 / Shakespeare in the Movies

liked about Whiting was "a gentle melancholy, the idealistic face
Romeo ought to have." Actually, both were trained and experienced.
The youngest member of Britain's National Theater, which supplied
many actors for this production, Whiting had played the Artful
Dodger in the Dickens-based musical Oliver! Hussey studied for four
years at London's Italia Conti Drama School, then starred opposite
Vanessa Redgrave in the West End production of The Prime of Miss
Jean Brodie. Still, at age fifteen, the half-Argentinian, half-English
girl was the youngest Juliet on record in a professional performance.
The approach worked; Romeo and Juliet proved a huge success,
particularly with the young. "The scenes may be in ancient palazzi,"
Maurice Rapf observed in Life, "but, filmed with untheatrical docu-
mentary lighting, they seem less far removed from us in time. We
see with mild shock of recognition that old folks represent an exist-
ing social order against which hot-blooded, individualist youth must
rebel to make a better world—even on pain of death." Viewed thirty
years later, the film was, like Shakespeare's play, less a youth-versus-
adult diatribe than Rapf insists. When Romeo and friends crash the
Capulet party, Juliet's parents accept him, adhering to the prince's
dictum against civil unrest; young Tybalt (Michael York), catalyst of
the tragedy, is the one who refuses to submit. Shakespeare, a con-
servative, would not state that untested youth is morally superior to
the adults; Zeffirelli, who would later identify himself as an outspo-
ken conservative, followed suit.
Zeffirelli learned from reviewers who had found fault with his
Taming of the Shrew, and he adapted on-target crticism into his
emerging technique. With Romeo and Juliet, he established an
approach for cinematic Shakespeare that has been accepted as the
norm ever since. Realizing it was wrong to create vivid images
inspired by the words while retaining dialogue rendered redundant
by the camera, Zeffirelli and collaborating screenwriters Franco
Brusati and Masolino D'Amico pared down the play in a consistent
manner. Shakespeare's lengthy descriptions were intended as com-
pensation for his own inability to show such stuff; the Elizabethan
audience needed to first hear in order to then see in their mind's
eye. Such passages now best serve as stage directions.
No more effective example exists than the sequence in which
Mercutio (John McEnery) and Tybalt accidentally meet, becoming
involved in a duel to the death. Shakespeare described at length the
atmosphere in Verona so that his audience could properly envision
the mood. Zeffirelli took his cue from the text: "In these hot days, is