Page 70 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

Star-Crossed Lovers / 59

Without a Cause) were perceived, in their time, as 1950s variations
on the theme. Onstage in the mid-1950s and on-screen in 1961, com-
posers Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein collaborated with
choreographer Jerome Robbins to musically reset Romeo and Juliet
in New York's mean streets, with white and Puerto Rican gangs in
conflict over turf (West Side Story).
Over the years, versions have been filmed in Spain (Julieta Y
Romeo, 1940), Egypt (Shulhadaa el gharam, 1942), Mexico (.Romeo 7
Julieta, 1943), India (Anjuman, 1948), France (Les Amants de Verone,
1949), Russia (.Romeo and Juliet, 1954), Czechoslovakia (Romeo,
Julie a tma, 1959), Italy (.Romeu Giuletta e romeo, 1964), Canada
(.Rome-O and Julie 8, 1979), Brazil (.Romeu Y Ulieta, 1982), and the
United States (China Girl, 1987). The feuding families can become
competing rural ranchers or big-city bootleggers, but the young
people always remain essentially the same.
When, in 1961, writer-director Peter Ustinov decided to puncture
the decade-old Cold War with humor, he concocted Romanoff and
Juliet, in which Sandra Dee, as the daughter of an American ambas-
sador, falls in love with John Gavin, son of the ambassador's Soviet
counterpart.
During the peace-and-love era, shortly before Zeffirelli's version
reached theater screens, young people were flocking to see Warren
Beatty and Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Dustin
Hoffman and Katharine Ross in The Graduate (1967), concerning
pairs of edgy outlaws and disenfranchised rich kids at odds with a
corrupt Establishment. Though Shakespeare's intent appears to have
been considerably less radical than such contemporary counterparts,
the play's legend has acquired a life all its own; lest we forget, a 1964
rock-and-roll song by the Reflections featured the refrain "Just like
.
Romeo and Juliet . . " That era's greasers understood what that
meant as surely as do the Gen Xers who lined up for the hip-hop
version with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes.