Romeo and Juliet On Screen - Other Performances

Other Performances

Film scholar Douglas Brode claims that Romeo and Juliet is the most-filmed play of all time. In the silent era it was filmed by Georges Méliès, which inspired a burlesque by Thomas Edison: both of which are now lost. Vitagraph produced a ten-minute version in 1908 which has survived, featuring Florence Lawrence. Gerolamo Lo Savio shot an ambitious version on location in Verona for Film d'Arte Italiana. Edwin and Gertrude Thanhouser produced a spectacular version in the USA. In 1916, Metro and Fox produced versions of the play as star-vehicles, the former featuring Francis X. Bushman as Romeo, and the latter featuring Theda Bara (usually famous for "vamp" roles) as the innocent Juliet. The play was first heard on film in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, in which John Gilbert recited the balcony scene opposite Norma Shearer as Juliet, who would later play the same role in George Cukor's feature version.

Renato Castellani won the Grand Prix at the Venice Film Festival for his 1954 film of Romeo and Juliet. His film contains interpolated scenes intended to establish the class system and Catholicism of Renaissance Verona, and the nature of the feud. Some of Castellani's changes have been criticised as ineffective: interpolated dialogue is often banal, and the Prince's appearances are reimagined as formal hearings: undermining the spontaneity of Benvolio's defence of Romeo's behaviour in the duel scene. The major supporting roles are vastly reduced, including that of the nurse; Mercutio becomes (in the words of Daniel Rosenthal) "the tiniest of cameos" and Friar Laurence "an irritating ditherer", although Pauline Kael, who loved the film, called this Friar Laurence "a radiantly silly little man". Castellani's most prominent changes related to Romeo's character, cutting back or removing scenes involving his parents, Benvolio and Mercutio in order to highlight Romeo's isolation, and inserting a parting scene in which Montague coldly pulls his banished son out of Lady Montague's farewell embrace. Another criticism made by film scholar Patricia Tatspaugh is that the realism of the settings, so carefully established throughout the film, "goes seriously off the rails when it come to the Capulets' vault". Castellani uses competing visual images in relation to the central characters: ominous grilles (and their shadows) contrasted with frequent optimistic shots of blue sky. A well-known stage Romeo, John Gielgud, played Castellani's chorus (and would reprise the role in the 1978 BBC Shakespeare version). Laurence Harvey, as Romeo, was already an experienced screen actor, who would shortly take over roles intended for the late James Dean in Walk on the Wild Side and Summer and Smoke. By contrast, Susan Shentall, as Juliet, was a secretarial student who was discovered by the director in a London pub, and was cast for her "pale sweet skin and honey-blonde hair". She failed to rise to the demands of the role, and would marry shortly after the shoot, never returning to screen acting. Other parts were played by inexperienced actors, also: Mercutio was played by an architect, Montague by a gondolier from Venice, and the Prince by a novelist. Critics responded to the film as a piece of cinema (its visuals were especially admired in Italy, where it was filmed) but not as a performance of Shakespeare's play: Robert Hatch in The Nation said "We had come to see a play... perhaps we should not complain that we were shown a sumptuous travelogue", and Time's reviewer added that "Castellani's Romeo and Juliet is a fine film poem... Unfortunately it is not Shakespeare's poem!"

In 1992, Leon Garfield abridged the play to 25 minutes for the S4C/Soyuzmultfilm Shakespeare: The Animated Tales series. Such drastic abridgement inevitably led to emphasising plot over character, and the Romeo and Juliet episode has been described as "almost absurdly frenetic". This episode was directed by Efim Gamburg, using cel animation.

The PBS series Wishbone aired its fourth episode "Rosie, Oh! Rosie, Oh!" in 1995 featuring the titular Jack Russell terrier as Romeo Montague in a television stage production of Romeo and Juliet.