Romeo and Juliet
1968: Franco Zeffirelli

While not without certain flaws, and saddled with an unreflective, almost gooey sentimentality that weakens the play in the long run, I would say that this is one of the more watchable versions of Romeo and Juliet, and reasonably faithful to the artistic intentions behind the original composition. When it was first released it was quite a celebrated production, and had many teenage admirers (mostly girls) swooning over it — for mostly the wrong reasons. It features Olivia Hussey at sixteen years old, in the role that made her famous, and her performance has seldom been surpassed for simple innocent charm, even though she doesn't seem to be the brightest Juliet ever to appear on film. (By which I mean no impeachment of Ms. Hussey’s intelligence: I suspect that was largely a function of her direction.) On the other hand, John McEnery's weirdly manic Mercutio and Michael York's intense Tybalt are worth seeing all on their own. Leonard Whiting's Romeo is, to my taste, eminently forgettable: he just seems to drift along in the company of more substantial actors.

The real star of the show is the setting: Zeffirelli was attempting to reawaken the play in its native Italy (an Italy that Shakespeare himself never saw, almost certainly), and he goes for a not-quite-naturalistic scrubbed past evocative of the costume dramas of the 1950s — a world without running water or dentists, in which people still remained unaccountably clean and have marvelously straight white teeth (as opposed to the world of The Return of Martin Guerre or the like). Still, it offers the play in something approaching period costumes on the streets of a more or less credible Renaissance Verona. The photography is solid. The score offers some music that is moderately cloying to my taste. The treacly theme song, “A Time for Us”, was wildly popular in its time, and now (at least for those of us who remember the era) evokes nothing so much as the late 1960s. Still, one can relish that or ignore it, according to one’s predisposition.

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