Pretty much everybody does Shakespeare plays in their high school English classes, although which plays depends on the teacher. In my case one year we did Romeo and Juliet, and supplemented it by watching the Franco Zeffirelli version from the late 1960s. I've known for a long time that MGM did a version in the 1930s in response to Warner Bros. making A Midsummer Night's Dream, but for various reasons I hadn't ever gotten around to seeing this 1936 version of Romeo and Juliet in its entirety. So when TCM ran it during 31 Days of Oscar, I finally recorded it and watched it to do a post on here.
Now, with a movie like Romeo and Juliet, pretty much everybody already knows the story. Romeo Montague (played here by Leslie Howard) and Juliet Capulet (played by Norma Shearer) are adolescents (more on that later) from families where the older generation are rivals with a sort of blood-lust in the medieval Italian city of Verona. But Romeo and Juliet meet at a masquerade ball without knowing who each other is, and most definitely not knowing that the other is from that rival family who is supposed to be off limits. So they fall in love and meet each other surreptitiously, at least until Juliet's father (C. Aubrey Smith) insists on marrying Juliet off to somebody of an appropriate social standing who is not a Montague. Juliet's attempt to get out of this arranged marriage leads to tragedy.
Since the story is already known, any attempt to review a Shakespearean movie comes down to other factors. First up is the casting. I think I mentioned when I posted about A Midsummer Night's Dream ages ago that Warner Bros. was able to use mostly more classically-trained actors for the "serious" roles, while putting a lot of their contract players into Nick Bottom's acting troupe. MGM didn't quite achieve that, notably in the opening scene where hey have Edna May Oliver as Juliet's nurse and Andy Devine of all people as the nurse's assistant. Devine's character who is the Capulet who kicks off the fight in the opening scene between the Capulets and Montagues, is more of a man-child, especially in the medieval wardrobe.
Many of the main characters are way too old for the parts by cinematic standards, although back in the day it wasn't as uncommon on the live stage for people a few years older than the parts to be playing roles like Romeo and Juliet. Traveling stage companies wouldn't have had a 15-year-old girl available to play Julet. Shearer doesn't come off badly, while Howard has no difficulty with Shakespearean dialogue although he decidedly looks way too old. Ditto John Barrymore as Mercutio. Basil Rathbone as Tybalt is another one who can handle the dialog, and got an Oscar nomination for his trouble.
The production design is lovely, which is no less than can be expected from a studio like MGM. For music, much as Warner Bros. turned to Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream, MGM also turned to pre-existing classical music; in this case mostly from Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet. Unsurprisingly the music works well.
In the final analysis, MGM did about as well as could be expected from a Hollywood studio in trying to make Shakespeare, although you can see why Hollywood studios would start staying away from Shakespeare for a while. But, it's also not quite to the standard that Warner Bros. had set with A Midsummer Night's Dream.
No comments:
Post a Comment