Word: juliet
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...this Romeo and Juliet had been produced in 1956, there might have been no need for West Side Story the following year. "I wanted to bring the story to the attention of young people," says Director Franco Zeffirelli. "The story is of two urchins crushed by a stupid, banal quarrel with origins even the adults don't know. In love the young couple found an ideal - one they could die for - and youth today is hungry for ideals...
They are not hungry for Shakespeare, but Zeffireli's Romeo and Juliet will surely do much to reawaken a youthful identification with the aristocratic "star-crossed lovers" who have been so long in the limbo of Required Reading. This is one of the handful of classic Shakespearean films; it ranks lower than the Olivier Henry V, but only because of the substance, not the direction. With a charged, witty camera, Zeffirelli has managed to make the play alive and wholly contemporary without having had to transfer the action to a modern setting. Romeo and Juliet appear afresh...
Instead of simply duplicating the first-folio on film, Zeffirelli and his two co-writers, Franco Brusati and Masolino d'Amico, have blithely excised and elided speeches, transposed lines, eliminated characters. It is a dangerous game, rewriting Shakespeare, but Romeo and Juliet proves that it can be played and won. An even greater risk was to give the leading roles to a pair of youthful unknowns with virtually no acting experience: Juliet is a tremulous 16-year-old, Olivia Hussey; Romeo is Leonard Whiting, 17. Both look their parts and read their lines with a sensitivity far beyond...
...somewhat less successful on the dramatic stage. His incoherent Othello was throttled by reviewers at Stratford-on-Avon. After seeing Zeffirelli's Broadway production of The Lady of the Camellias, TIME's critic called him "a director who needs a director." Even the movie of Romeo and Juliet will not please everybody, since it clearly reflects Zeffirelli's idiosyncratic opinions of Shakespeare. "Mercutio," he insists, "is a self-portrait of Shakespeare himself, and a homosexual...
...acquired a sealskin parka, drove a motorcycle across the permafrost, and danced with an Eskimo go-go girl. During a recent visit to Montreal, he spent an evening clinking glasses at Man and His World, this year's version of Expo. On a jaunt to see Romeo and Juliet at Stratford, Ont., he was able to command the Prime Minister's private railway car and, naturally, a backstage visit with Juliet: 24-year-old Actress Louise Marleau...