Word: romeos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ROMEO AND JULIET. Franco Zeffirelli turns one of Shakespeare's most familiar plays into a movie of stunning immediacy. Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, as the passionate, star-crossed lovers, perform with a maturity beyond their years...
...ROMEO AND JULIET. Franco Zeffirelli breathes new life into one of Shakespeare's most familiar plays. The violence is so visceral and the youthful lovers are so passionate that the story assumes a startling immediacy...
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...
...been 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...
Adverse criticism has so far not inhibited Zeffirelli's energy, esteem or income. His salary for Romeo and Juliet was $50,000 plus a hefty percentage, and he will make even more from his new projects, notably a movie of Brecht's Galileo, starring Rod Steiger. At his bachelor villa near Rome, Zeffirelli remains the low-pressure gran signore, entertaining ten or twelve friends for lunch, inhaling gusts of Winston smoke from fingertip-held cigarettes. His braggadocio extends even to his genealogy. "One day my father showed up with an armful of documents," he recalls. "He finally...