Romeo and Juliet 1936

Earlier this summer I went to see a friend who participates in community theater in a production of Romeo and Juliet. It was a kind of a sad spectacle (aside from my friend, of course) as the director chose to mount the play in modern-dress, using guns instead of swords, etc. This does not automatically doom a production, but when a director makes this choice there has to be some kind of point to be made, such as when Orson Welles set Julius Caesar in fascist Europe. For this particular production, I fear the director chose to do this because he wanted to make it more accessible to modern audiences. When you start by assuming your audience is dumb, you're sunk.

I know Romeo and Juliet better than any of Shakespeare's plays, because when I was a theater student in college we did a year-long study of the play, which culminated in a production (I played Benvolio). In the fall we studied the text, Shakespeare's time, and almost everything else about the play, and then in the spring semester we rehearsed and performed the play. Our director, after flirting with the idea of setting it in gangland Chicago (a common choice, but too much like West Side Story) we ended up doing a traditional production, set in, of all places, renaissance Italy. How novel! It was the most rewarding thing I did during my college years.

There have been three major film productions of Romeo and Juliet, all of them available on DVD, so I'm going to take a look at them over the next few days. The first, which I had never seen before, was a George Cukor production released in 1936. Today this film is something of a figure of fun, as the first thing noticed is that the actors playing the leads are far too old for the parts. Leslie Howard was 42, Norma Shearer 34, and John Barrymore, playing Mercutio, was 54! The film was from MGM, and set up by Irving Thalberg specifically for Shearer, his wife.

It's not a bad film. It's certainly very conventional, couched in a kind of Victorian approach to Shakespeare (a style that was dying out, due to people like Welles). The actors declaim in a fashion that is years away from naturalism--Shearer actually puts the back of her hand to her forehead on a few occasions, something that is only done today in parody. But the actors also are magnificent at speaking the poetry. Howard, in particular, is a pleasure to listen to, and Barrymore seems to have great fun. Also excellent is Edna Mae Oliver as the Nurse and Basil Rathbone as Tybalt. I'm not so sure about Andy Devine, who was best known for Westerns (he's the stagecoach driver in Stagecoach) as the comic character of Peter.

One thing I always am amused by in films or stage productions of Romeo and Juliet is what is cut or rearranged, as no one does Shakespeare unabridged (except Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet). Cukor does rearrange a few things, such as introducing Juliet before Romeo, and cutting the Friar's speech that cues us in on his fascination with making potions out of plants. But there's nothing controversial about Cukor's moves, and this film does nothing that would Shakespeare roll in his grave.