Word: juliets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...KINGDOM for a stage!" cried Shakespeare, but he could only dream and meanwhile curse the "unworthy scaffold" he must needs make do with. The stage, when Romeo and Juliet was first presented, was little more than a gangway shunted shoulder-high through a roaring mob.*Down these bare boards an actor strode, and with a wave of the arm required his hearers to believe they were "in fair Verona, where we lay our scene." In later centuries, notably toward the end of the 19th, productions of Shakespeare became almost as richly furnished as they were badly played; but not until...
...Arthur Rank put up part of the cash, Castellani put together his company, including Cameraman Robert Krasker-who in Henry V matched Shakespeare's morning language with an early wonder in his light and color-and the youngest Romeo (26-year-old Laurence Harvey) and Juliet (20-year-old Susan Shentall) of recent date. For seven months the cameras pored over the choice beauties of Venice, Verona, Siena, and several smaller cities of the golden age. What they recorded is a living image-the curious mingling of the radiant with the sinister, the earthy beauty like a kind...
...scenic compositions, are copies from old masterpieces by Lippo Lippi, Pisanello, Carpaccio, Lorenzo. As the orchestra tunes up for the Capulets' ball, five little boys step up to sing, and suddenly are grouped, in lovely archaic rhythm, as a choir of cherubs in Raphael's style. Juliet, in the scene where she first sees Romeo, is dressed like Botticelli's Flora, and the lines of her head and neck might be a tracing from Veneziano's Portrait of a Young Lady...
Image by image, in short, Castellani's Romeo and Juliet is a fine film poem. Unfortunately, it is not Shakespeare's poem. In his obsession with the beautiful single frame, Castellani has ignored not only the rhythm of Shakespeare's scenes but has even failed to set a rhythm when he cuts from frame to frame. Furthermore, his continental ear could not catch the endless modulations of voice that are necessary to make Shakespeare's language intelligible-let alone affecting-to a modern audience...
...their youth-and also of their inexperience. As Romeo, Laurence Harvey fails to generate much glandular heat, and, like most Romeos, reads his lines with a kind of empty fervor. Susan Shentall, while reading hers without distinction, nevertheless has what is so rare and so right in a Juliet: a delicate haze of sensuality that clouds the clear child face with passion's promises. The scene in which Romeo and Juliet meet, in which she foots the galliard, and the two touch trembling hands in the dainty ballad of the masks, is a passage paced to the heartbeat...