Romeo and Juliet: Star-Crossed Spectacle

All three of these films were important in Zeffirelli’s career, but Romeo and Juliet stands out for making Shakespeare newly fashionable among young moviegoers. Produced on a small budget, it became a box-office hit and the most financially profitable of all the director’s ventures. Though faithful to the play’s well-known story of young lovers Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet, who are driven to their untimely deaths by a long-standing feud between their families, this adaptation is distinguished by sumptuous imagery that redefined the Shakespeare film and elevated Zeffirelli’s reputation to new heights. In his 1986 autobiography, the director describes the experience of “cross[ing] over from one state to another” in the wake of the movie’s success: “I would now operate on a different plane.”

Romeo and Juliet begins with a composition that testifies to Zeffirelli’s love of visual splendor. The leisurely crane shot of a period cityscape of Verona, Italy, beneath a dissipating fog, echoes a similar camera trajectory at the start of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944). And it is the voice of an uncredited Olivier that we hear at the outset of Romeo and Juliet, delivering the play’s famous prologue (“Two households, both alike in dignity”)—and indicating the film’s intention to insert itself into the tradition of Shakespearean cinema. At the same time, Zeffirelli makes manifest his signature style. The mist anticipates the use of diaphanous fabrics later in the film, including the muslin drapes that conceal Juliet’s bed and the shrouds that adorn corpses in the crypt where the tragedy’s climax takes place. A symbol of passion, the emerging sun intimates a dialectic of love and hate, the opposing forces that drive the story.

Much of Romeo and Juliet is animated by juxtapositions similar to this one between the mist and the sun: for example, the interplay between Nino Rota’s iconic, fuguelike score, characterized by solemn strings and woodwinds, and the loud, diegetic bustle of the market square that defines the narrative’s urban milieu. Another key contrast lies in Zeffirelli’s commingling of his spectacular sensibility with the tropes of realism. Romeo and Juliet was filmed on location in several Italian towns—including Tuscania, Pienza, and Artena—and Zeffirelli repeatedly lingers on majestic rooftops, looming facades, and widely arched passageways to create a sense of both grandeur and verisimilitude. These exterior settings, along with the handheld camera work used in select scenes, foster an authenticity of action and movement.

In the first half of the film, groups are identified through a recognizable color scheme made up of luxuriant hues—blue and yellow for the Capulets, blue and green for the Montagues. (The costumes were designed by Danilo Donati, who won an Academy Award for his work on the movie.) The quick-to-anger household servants are clad in tights and exaggerated codpieces, signifying stereotypical ideas of Renaissance masculinity and lending graphic form to the play’s bawdy puns. The roving camera begins at the men’s feet and pauses just below their waists, suggesting a phallic motivation for the subsequent violence. The opening fight between the Montague and Capulet men is a splendid set piece, with giddy, delirious cinematography that captures the energy of a frenzied conflict, and an overhead shot that confirms that a “mutiny” is engulfing the city.

Zeffirelli’s casting of young actors was vital and innovative for the time. It was also an attempt to honor Shakespearean practice; as Zeffirelli muses in his autobiography, Shakespeare “used a fourteen-year-old boy to play Juliet” and believed that “youth was more important than enunciation.” This spirit of homage undergirded what Zeffirelli writes was an “insanely risky” desire to employ inexperienced actors in the key roles. Leonard Whiting, described by the director as “the most exquisitely beautiful male adolescent I’ve ever met,” was cast as Romeo fairly quickly. Olivia Hussey was initially rejected for the role of Juliet, but after Zeffirelli’s first choice cropped her long hair, the director then judged Hussey, whose “magnificent bone structure” and “wide, expressive eyes” he admired, ideal for the part. Not only did these casting decisions help the film to become popular with young audiences, they also made possible a naturalistic performance style that departs from theatrical convention. During the balcony scene, for example, Hussey poses Juliet’s famous question—“O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”—with a colloquial delivery that brings a contemporary emotional resonance to the line.

The youthful orientation of Zeffirelli’s approach aligns with that of Hollywood films from the same era, such as West Side Story (1961) and The Graduate (1967). And, like those films, Romeo and Juliet foregrounds the idea of a generation gap. In contrast to Shakespeare’s evenhanded apportioning of blame, Zeffirelli’s interpretation places the guilt solely on the shoulders of the adults. In the film, the Capulet and Montague parents are in thrall to marital frictions and adultery, one instance of which is a quasi-incestuous entanglement between Juliet’s cousin Tybalt (Michael York) and her mother, Lady Capulet (Natasha Parry). Zeffirelli also augments the drama surrounding two secondary characters, the nurse (Pat Heywood) and Friar Laurence (Milo O’Shea), highlighting how both finally abandon their young charges to their fates.

Zeffirelli’s preoccupation with youth, beauty, and spectacle becomes all the more urgent as the film reaches its end. The last sequence, a splendidly torchlit processional, shows Romeo and Juliet being brought into the city square on biers, presenting the consequences of Verona’s unceasing “strife” for judgment. But Zeffirelli’s blocking here suggests the possibility of a shared understanding, and Romeo and Juliet’s corpses are clad in their wedding clothes, implying a posthumous acceptance of the couple’s marriage. The prince’s pronouncement—“All are punishèd”—is repeated as the camera pans over guilty-looking faces; in this moment, weather dovetails with mood, registered in shots of billowing black veils. The hint of a thaw emerges as the two warring sides pass into the cathedral together and the patriarchs at last acknowledge each other. Olivier’s voice is heard again, this time intoning the prince’s observation that “a glooming peace this morning with it brings”—words that suggest a new beginning. The communal movement from outdoors to indoors (another quintessentially Zeffirelli gesture) lifts the bleakness of the play’s ending with a muted hope for change.

The film’s influence on the imaginations of subsequent Shakespearean directors has been profound. Perhaps the most notable example is Baz Luhrmann, whose Romeo + Juliet (1996) mimics the textual and technical choices of its predecessor in some of its compositions and line deliveries. Entrenched as an authoritative adaptation, Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet is still admired, taught, and studied today for its spectacular re-creation of the past and its reinvention of the Shakespearean spoken word. Even as filmmakers find new ways of interpreting the play, this version continues to claim a definitive place in the history of cinematic Shakespeare.