Head to head with two masters

Franco Zeffirelli's second major film begins with a scene of violence between the Capulets and Montagues that even now seems more appropriate footage for Caligula than Shakespeare's timeless love story. It's as if the emerging director had discovered the film industry's cookie jar and indulged himself more from an experimental than artistic viewpoint. The early (and only) shots of bare-chested onlookers are equally intriguing but seem, somehow, out of place.

Nonetheless, from that point on the story is unfolded with Zeffirelli's customary style and metaphoric imagery, spectacularly assisted by the unerring eye of cinematographer Pasqualino De Santis. For, in this Romeo and Juliet, holding hands and caressing heads become as integral as the text.

Leonard Whiting as Romeo brings his compelling good looks (arguably the most tasteful celebration of male buttocks ever filmed, following the consummation night with his doomed lover) and just-right touch of youthful confusion to the role. In his first big scene he cradles best-friend Marcutio's (John McEnery adroitly provides the punning madness) head with tenderness and affection that never slips into awkward sub-text that would arise if two North American men lingered in such a trusting pose.

While just 15, Olivia Hussey's Juliet seems too buxom by half (push-up bras withstanding), although she teases us as much as the camera until her breasts do momentarily fill the screen in a sequence of will-she?/won't-she? show-and-tell that has its male equivalent with Malcolm McDowell's pride discreetly uncovered in Kubrick's contemporary A Clockwork Orange. (The men's tasselled jocks are also similar to their plastic counterparts which protect Alex and his droogs in the 1972 Kubrick classic.)

Of course Nino Rota's score and title song nearly exceed the film's popularity, but the little wisp of a mostly in-tune voice that delivers it at the masque seems more effeminate than the full-blooded string version later in the score.

The discreet tolling of the Church bells underscore the many deaths well and the camera's numerous returns to the magnificent station of the cross in the nave (particularly when the sight of it determines the chemist-priest—brilliantly portrayed by Milo O'Shea—to go ahead with the controversial marriage, hoping that uniting the forever-warring families with God's blessing will end the feud) adds silent motivation to the sonic depth. However, the excessive wailing of the ill-fated couple as they suffer all manner of losses and set-backs throughout the film made me want to turn them over my knee and "give you something to cry about."

But everything hinges on the visual realizations of death. Tybalt's, in a fight scene that ranks with the best ever, falls to the ground arms stretched out in crucifix manner, allowing his nipple and nail-like fatal wound to complete the metaphor-imagery used to similar effect by Canada's Guy Maddin's Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary (cross-reference below).

Then the final scene in the crypt when Juliet plunges the symbolic dagger home to re-join her husband, after her fall we are treated to the unforgettable image of the lovers' heads layered diagonally: the tragic result of pointless bickering.

In the coda, the young bodies area carried side by side, but for the first time when sharing the screen are unable to connect in any manner. But Zeffirelli isn't quite done, for in the closing credits two young men—one from either house—turn their despair into an embrace. Has something finally been learned?

Director	Franco Zeffirelli
Producers	John Brabourne, Anthony Havelock-Allan
Screenwriters	Franco Brusati, Maestro D'Amico, Franco Zeffirelli
Cinematographer	Pasqualino De Santis
Production Designer	Lorenzo Monigiardino
Editor	Reginald Mills
Music	Nino Rota
Main Cast	Robert Biasco, Olivia Hussey, Milo O'Shea, Keith Skinner, Richard Warwick, Leonard Whiting, Michael York

Cross-references: Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary; Resurgence Theatre: Romeo and Juliet; Zeffirelli's Otello; Zeffirelli's La Bohème; James Wegg discusses Zeffirelli's art