Franco Zeffirelli – Movie Musings

Burton and Taylor are perfect casting in this rollicking adaptation of Shakespeare’s most difficult comedy

Director: Franco Zeffirelli

Cast: Elizabeth Taylor (Kate), Richard Burton (Petruchio), Cyril Cusack (Grumio), Michael Hordern (Baptista Minola), Alfred Lynch (Tranio), Alan Webb (Gremio), Michael York (Lucentio), Natasha Pyne (Bianca), Victor Spinetti (Hortensio), Roy Holder (Biondello), Mark Dignam (Vincentio), Vernon Dobtcheff (Pedant), Bice Valori (Widow)

There’s a reason why the poster screamed “The motion picture they were made for!” Who else could play literature’s most tempestuous couple, than the world’s most tempestuous couple? After all, they rolled into this straight off the success of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and, say what you like, a knock-about piece of Shakespearean farce is certainly more fun than two hours of Edward Albee. So, Burton and Taylor turned up in Italy, entourage in hand, to bring The Taming of the Shrew to life in a gorgeous explosion of grand sets and wonderfully detailed costumes.

The Taming of the Shrew actually translates well to the screen – and Zeffirelli’s high-octane style. Odd to think now, for a film soaked in elaborate period setting, that in the 60s Zeffirelli’s style was seen as border-line sacrilegious to the Bard. He actually escaped with less opprobrium from the critics than he faced for cutting two-thirds of Romeo and Juliet a year later, since most seemed to think Shrew was less of a holy text. Not that it stopped a lot of critics reckoning Zeffirelli should focus more on executing every pentameter to perfection and less on gags and visual story-telling.

But actually, that’s perfect for a story that was always a raucous farce at heart – so much so, even the original play presents it as a play-within-a-play told to a drunken Christopher Sly (cut here). The bawdiness feels fresh out of Chaucer and Boccaccio, a parade of people in period costumes slapping thighs, roaring with laughter, double taking and enjoying a series of cheeky jokes (did Pasolini watch this before making his lusty adaptations?). Padua is a city of sin, with prostitutes openly advertising their wares (and later, clearly, invited to Bianca’s wedding) and a wife-stealer is in the stocks.

Zeffirelli’s Shrew is full of rowdy wildness – in a nod to the cut Sly framing device, Padua is in the midst of a feast of fools, students turning a choral sing-along into a drunken celebration. Kate and Petruchio’s high-octane gunning for each other, feels fitting for a location where everyone is careering wildly towards the target of their immediate emotions, either horny beyond belief, desperate to marry off daughters or furious at supposed crimes or betrayals.

The age-old question you have when staging Shrew is what to do about its fundamental misogyny (and it’s hard not to argue, much as the bard’s defenders have tried, not to see it as a play deeply rooted in the patriarchy). Zeffirelli’s solution is an intriguing one: his Shrew is enigmatic, with Kate’s motivations, feelings and reasonings often left cleverly open to interpretation. It’s also helped, of course, by the natural chemistry between the two leads. If there is one thing we all know, it’s that Burton and Taylor were really into each other and drove each other up the wall. What Shrew does here is take that sexual force and exuberance of its leads and balances that with a subtle unreadable quality to Kate that leaves the relationship’s power-balance just open enough to interpretation.

In addition, the film makes clear Kate’s behaviour is unacceptable, introduced screaming abuse from a window and smashing up all the furniture in a room in a fit of furious pique. There’s a lovely touch where Petruchio stares into his own reflection, while planning his campaign – a nice suggestion that he will mirror her behaviour to show its unacceptability (indeed, on returning to their marriage home, he’ll also twice smash up a room’s contents in a pointless display of adolescent petulance). Kate has, to put it bluntly, anger management issues and if Petruchio’s methods are extreme you can see the twisted logic.

Their first meeting sets a pacey tone that will run through the whole film. It’s a wild chase through the Baptista home, through a connected wool barn, over a roof and back again. One in which they will bellow at each other, Kate will rip up planks and bannisters to throw at him, they’ll roll in the wool (hard not to see a sexual charge here) and eventually collapse through the roof to land back in the wool. Petruchio will then announce her consent to marry with an arm twisted round her back, just as he will cut off her refusal at the altar with a kiss (the wedding scene is a neat interpolation, showing something the Bard only reports). They are in a constant pursuit of sorts from here, from the back-and-forth at Petruchio’s house, to the journey to Padua and then finally through a crowd of women at the film’s end. But where does the power lie: pursued or pursuer?

At first, of course, with the pursuer. Burton’s Petruchio is a wild-eyed force-of-nature, permanently partly sozzled (Burton spends most of the film with a pale, damp drinking sweat that was probably not acting), his tights full of holes, his manners rude (he’s basically Christopher Sly in the lead role), focused on the money he’ll get from wooing Kate. But, while he’s a powerful alpha male, it’s remarkable how the balance slowly shifts to Kate. After their arrival at his home (she, soaking wet after falling in a puddle to Petruchio’s laughter), she puts her drunken husband to bed, has the house redecorated, the servants redressed and everything arranged to her liking.

Taylor’s performance here adds to the effect. It’s an intelligent, camera-wise performance which uses looks to convey Kate’s loneliness and pain. Locked in a room before the wedding, she glances out of a window with aching sadness. She looks with gentle envy at warm friendship in others. Taylor gives a wonderfully calm, genuine delivery of the famous closing speech of wifely piety. But it’s words are undermined in two ways: firstly by the suspicion it’s partly done to show-up the jokes against her throughout the wedding, and then by Taylor’s immediate departure after kissing a finally flabbergasted Petruchio, leaving our macho hero wading through a pile of laughing women in a desperate attempt to catch-up. Who might just rule here, long term?

Zeffirelli’s film moves the Lucentio (a wide-eyed Michael York) sub-plot even further to the margins – in a neat invention, Petruchio during the first chase, keeps barging in on rooms where different sub-plot scenes are all going on at the same time. As a result, this does mean a number of first-rate actors get very little to do: Cyril Cusack’s Grumio becomes a grinning observer of the chaos, Alfred Lynch’s Tranio (after some initial fourth-wall breaking) fades into the background, Michael Hordern has little to do but look aghast as a desperate Minola, Alan Webb barely registers as a rejected suitor while after an initial sight gag (his minstrel player disguise making him look like the fifth Beatle) Victor Spinetti gets similarly fades away.

But then audiences were here for the Burton-Taylor show, and they get that in spades: framed within a medieval setting inspired by classical painting (and which features an obviously fake backdrop for its countryside exteriors). And The Taming of the Shrew is rollicking good fun, which manages to work an interesting line on the play’s troublesome sexual politics, suggesting that all but not always be as it seems. And it nails the atmosphere of rollicking fun in this ribald Shakespeare yarn.

Zeffirelli helps to reinvent Shakespeare on film as vibrant, urgent, young and sexy

Director: Franco Zeffirelli

Cast: Leonard Whiting (Romeo), Olivia Hussey (Juliet), John McEnery (Mercutio), Milo O’Shea (Friar Laurence), Pat Heywood (Nurse), Paul Hardwick (Lord Capulet), Natasha Perry (Lady Capulet), Robert Stephens (Prince), Michael York (Tybalt), Bruce Robinson (Benvolio)

When Romeo and Juliet was released in 1968, it was like a shot of adrenalin into the heart of Shakespeare. It was a play where audiences were used to middle-aged classical actors posing as teenage lovers (not just on stage: the last Hollywood version cast Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer with a combined age of 76). It was a play of wispy poetry, light breaking from yonder windows and stately tragedy. What it definitely wasn’t, was a young play. A play full of vibrant energy, youthful abandon and plenty of sex and violence. Zeffirelli’s film changed that: it was fast, sexy and above all young. It was unlike any Romeo and Juliet many cinema goers had seen before.

Everything new is eventually old of course. So influential was Zeffirelli’s film, it came to be remembered as a “tights and poetry” epic. Its traditional Renaissance Italian setting and well-spoken cast came 30 years later to represent the very same stuffy traditionalism it was kicking in the shins. When Baz Luhrmann released his William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, full of fast-paced editing, MTV tunes, gunplay and horny, Verona Beach teenagers, it was biting its thumb at the revolutionary style of Shakespeare Zeffirelli had introduced.

But, such is the richness of Shakespeare, there is more than enough room for both visions. Watching the film today is still to be struck by its pace and energy. This is a grimy, immediate film which Zeffirelli frequently shoots with a handheld intensity (particularly in the film’s sequences of violence). The costumes may have a primary-coloured sheen to them, but the emotions are raw and dangerous. There is a comedic zip and energy to its first half, which gives way to a grim sense of inevitable tragedy, that always seems just a few adjusted decisions away from being averted.

To pull the film together, Zeffirelli made some tough decisions. Almost 65% of the dialogue was jettisoned, most notably the whole of Juliet’s speech prior to taking the sleeping drug. Everything was cut and arranged to play to the strengths of his cast. His young lovers were great at the physical and emotional teenage energy, so that’s what Zeffirelli focused on. He cast two unknowns: 17-year-old Leonard Whiting and 15-year-old Olivia Hussey. Both had exactly the sort of unfussy naturalism he was looking for, playing the roles with a breathless, energetic genuineness.

They are, of course, not the greatest performers of the roles you will ever see. But Whiting’s Romeo is passionate, naïve and utterly believable as the sort of love-struck teenager who will choose oblivion when he’s lost his true love. Hussey (who, unlike Whiting, continued as an actor) has a wonderful innocent quality and a forceful determination underneath it. The two of them throw themselves into every scene (and each other) with gusto, rolling on the floor in despair or bounding into fights and arguments as if every word or blow will be their last.

It’s a youthful energy that the whole film bottles up and sells to the audience. Its opening scene takes the “I bite my thumb at you sir” classicism of the initial Montague-Capulet clash, and throws it into a dusty street brawl that sucks in most of the city. The camera weaves among this action, as people fly at each other, onlookers run in panic and extras’ bodies pile into the scuffle.

It’s an effective entrée for the film’s most effective sequence: the plot-turning fight that leads to the death of Mercutio and Tybalt. Zeffirelli brilliantly stages this as youthful bravado and hot-headedness that gets out of hand. Mercutio and Tybalt’s fight is initially more performative than deadly (so much so Mercutio’s friends don’t realise he’s been wounded until he dies) – only Romeo’s attempts to stop it cause it to escalate. Tybalt is horrified at the possibility he has harmed Mercutio and flees in terror. Mercutio maintains a front of all-good-fun that turns more and more into bitterness. Romeo’s revenge on Tybalt starts as an out-matched sword fight but turns into a brutal, dusty scrabble on the ground, with fists and daggers flying. All shot and staged with an improvisational wildness, people in the crowd ducking out of the way. It still carries real immediacy.

It’s particularly effecting as, until then, the film is arguably a romantic comedy. The first half not only surrenders itself to the youthful abandon and passion of the lovers, it’s also not adverse to a bit of knock-about farce with the Nurse (a fine performance of gruff affection from Pat Heywood). The Capulets’ ball is staged as another immersive scene, Nina Rota’s music helping to create one of the best renaissance courtly dances on film. With Romeo blanked by an austere Rosalind (who seems to barely know who he is), it zeroes in on the intense, can’t-take-my-eyes-off-you bond between the two lovers. All of it shot with a dreamy romantic intensity.

That carries across to the balcony scene, that again stresses the dynamism and sexual longing that revolutionises the poetry-and-posing the scene had become in people’s minds. This is after all a young couple who can’t keep their hands off each other to such an extent, they have to be physically separated by Friar Laurence (a cuddly Irish Milo O’Shea, over-confident and ineffective) before their marriage.

It makes it all the more striking then when the second half tips into melancholy and heartbreak. Zeffirelli brings the focus even more intensely onto the lovers. As well as Juliet’s speech, the Apothecary and Romeo’s killing of Paris (shot but cut as there were worries it would make the hero less sympathetic) are ditched, and the action is streamlined and runs inexorably to Romeo’s decease and the camera’s focus on Juliet’s hand as she begins to come back to life.

It’s a film full of interesting little side notes and character interpretations. John McEnery’s energetically manic and witty Mercutio (he, along with O’Shea handles much of the actual Shakespeare) is excellent, with more than a hint of a repressed homoerotic longing for Romeo. Natasha Perry’s austere Lady Capulet flirts openly with Michael York’s fiery Tybalt (their secret affair now a popular interpretation) while Paul Hardwick’s bluster as Capulet carries an air of desperation, with Zeffirelli capturing sad glances at his wife. To bolster its Shakespeare credentials, Olivier speaks the prologue (as well as dubbing multiple members of the Italian cast) for no pay or credit (though he must have known there was zero chance of his famous voice not being recognised!).

Zeffirelli’s film may just be, in its way, one of the most important Shakespeare films in history. If Olivier had shown Shakespeare could work as spectacle and Welles that it could be art, Zeffirelli showed it could be exciting and cinematic. That energy and filmic motion didn’t need to serve the poetry. It became so influential, that it eventually came to be seen decades later as “classical Shakespeare”. But it helped lay the groundwork for a series of films and productions that would leave posing, poetical renditions of the Bard behind.