Word: zeffirelli
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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...
...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 as two incredibly articulate but believably, agonized teen-agers whose turf happens to be Quattrocento Verona. Too young to buck the Establishment-the Italian...
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...
...TAMING OF THE SHREW. Shakespeare possibly would not have recognized his comedy, but he certainly would have enjoyed watching Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Franco Zeffirelli's lusty, sensuous production...
...TAMING OF THE SHREW. Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Director Franco Zeffirelli have mounted the liveliest screen incarnation of Shakespeare since Olivier's Henry...