Pretty in Black and White

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, after viewing several vintage Anne Hathaway films, about how often Hollywood has focused on stories of young women emerging to take over their lives. Obviously, such plot lines are meant to appeal to youthful female audiences, who hope that they too will burst like butterflies from the drab cocoons that have long been holding them in. Think Cinderella turning from a scullery maid to a princess. Think Eliza Doolittle casting aside her Cockney upbringing and her native speech patterns to go to the Embassy Ball and be mistaken for royalty. Think, more recently, of Pretty in Pink (representing other Eighties films of John Hughes) in which Molly Ringwald crosses from the wrong side of the tracks to wow her classmates at her high school prom.

 In many of these films, the focus is on the young protagonist discovering her physical beauty, or maybe demonstrating that she has learned the social skills that will help her navigate the adult world. But there’s a classic 1950 black-&-white comedy (somehow characterized by the often obtuse Golden Globes folks as a drama) in which the female protagonist blossoms, but not because of her improved looks or social manners. Instead, Born Yesterday is a comic paean to the way that political education can change a gal’s life.

 Born Yesterday, based on Garson Kanin’s hit Broadway play, stars the inimitable Judy Holliday as a former nightclub cutie with a New Yawk accent that won’t quit. Though basically a chorine with pretensions—she once spoke three lines on stage—she has long been the sidepiece of Harry Brock, a crude and very rich junkman with his eye on a shady deal involving a U.S. Congressman. (He’s played in the film by Broderick Crawford, who’d just nabbed an Oscar for his lead role as a Huey Long-type in All the King’s Men.) Harry loves Billie Dawn, when he isn’t busy abusing her, because she accepts her own ignorance and never pries into his sordid business affairs. But now that he’s arrived in Washington DC, he figures her uncouth social behavior may become a liability. So he recruits a straight-arrow local reporter named Paul (William Holden) to give Billie a smattering of education.

 Squiring Billie around the nation’s capital, Paul gives her some serious tutelage about American ideals and principles (something we could surely all use today). Though her vocabulary is limited and her shrill voice seems capable of shattering glass, she discovers in herself a thirst for knowledge, as well as a firm determination to no longer be anyone’s patsy. Needless to say, this change in attitude makes an ongoing relationship with Harry Brock untenable. And the smart, well-educated Paul (perhaps savoring his role as her Pygmalion) comes to love Billie’s oddball combination of budding idealism and street smarts.

 George Cukor was known, perhaps unfairly, as a women’s director. He certainly knew how to transfer Holliday’s acclaimed stage performance as Billie Dawn to the silver screen. The voice, the dimples, and the would-be haughty walk are all captured for moviegoers to enjoy. Holliday’s characterization is both funny and lovable, which is perhaps how she remarkably beat out Gloria Swanson (Sunset Boulevard) and both Bette Davis and Anne Baxter (All About Eve) for the Best Actress Oscar of 1951. It was the great triumph of a brilliant but sadly short career. Born in 1921, she died of breast cancer in 1960, just a decade after her greatest triumph. Her last role was a musical performance in another Broadway transfer, Bells are Ringing, in which she was once again irresistibly adorable.

 Dedicated to the memory of Dolly Parton, another adorable blonde who was smarter than she sometimes let on.

 

 

The Philadelphia (and Newport, Rhode Island) Story

High Society (1956) promises fun at the movies. And it delivers. This spritely screwball musical stars Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, both of whose characters are at least somewhat in love with an elegant heiress, Tracy Lord, played by the blonde and beautiful Grace Kelly. This was to be Kelly’s very last movie role before she married a real-life Prince Charming and became Princess Grace of Monaco. Rounding out the cast are the acerbic Celeste Holm and the delightfully ebullient Louis Armstrong. The setting is ritzy Newport, Rhode Island, where the central characters live in posh mansions, surrounded by fawning retainers.  

 Armstrong’s presence is explained by the fact that there’s a jazz festival in the vicinity. He acts as a kind of narrator to open and close the film; he also memorably duets with Crosby on the up-tempo "Now You Has Jazz.” In this story, Crosby plays  C. K. Dexter Haven, a well-heeled singer/composer who is Tracy Lord’s neighbor, as well as her former husband. Though they were once deeply attached, and shared a romantic honeymoon aboard a yacht called the “True Love,” affection has turned to loathing (on Tracy’s part, at least), followed by an acrimonious divorce. Now Tracy is on the brink of marrying a staid businessman, and Dex wanders over to observe the hubbub. You see, C. K. Dexter Haven has (in his relaxed way) never quite gotten over Tracy, and he’s hanging around to check on what his former wife is up to.

 Also in residence on the wedding weekend are a magazine journalist (Sinatra) and his photographer sidekick (Holm), determined to get a scoop on this big society event. Everything goes haywire on the night before the nuptials, when Tracy gets drunk and Sinatra’s character gallantly comes to her rescue.

 The Cole Porter ditties (including the romantic hit, “True Love” and a nifty Crosby/Sinatra duet) are appealing, and there are no false notes among the performers. Still, seeing High Society again after many years, I became convinced that there was a better version of this tale to be found. And so, of course, there is. Back in 1940, the great George Cukor directed The Philadelphia Story, based on a Philip Barry stage hit that starred Katharine Hepburn. Hepburn’s Hollywood career had recently been foundering, and so she bought the play’s film rights in order to reintroduce herself to the moviegoing public. It worked magnificently well, especially since Cukor invited two of the era’s brightest male stars, Cary Grant and James Stewart, to play the main men in her life., If Hoboken’s rough-and-tumble Frank Sinatra is amusing when he romances the soignée Grace Kelly in and around her estate’s swimming pool, imagine how much funnier it is when aw-shucks Jimmy Stewart pitches woo to the imperious Hepburn. And of course Cary Grant is Cary Grant, effortlessly suave and just the fellow to tame this particular shrew. What we love about Katharine Hepburn is how wonderfully she plays a woman who is absolutely wrong about pretty much everything. Seeing her get her comeuppance is a delight for those of us who admire strong women but also place great stock in happily-ever-after.

 F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, insisted that the very rich “are different from you and me.” To which his pal Ernest Hemingway wryly reposted, “Yes, they have more money.” Movie fans, particularly in the years coming out of the Great Depression, preferred to think that—despite all their riches—the wealthy could be as foolish as those of us with emptier pockets. The Philadelphia Story certainly proves this is so.   

 

Dears and Bitches: “The Women”

Have times changed? Claire Boothe Luce’s bitchy 1936 social comedy, The Women, was a huge Broadway sensation. The rights were purchased by MGM for a 1939 film that, like the play, features only women in its large cast. That hardly means that men play no part in the Park Avenue world the work depicts. Virtually everything these soignée females do revolves around their intimate connection with (off-screen) men. For MGM, this property was a chance to give meaty roles to the many impressive actresses on its roster. Some, like stars Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford, apparently had their own off-camera feuds going. In any case, the on-screen bitchery struck audiences then and now as hilarious, and the film has been rewarded with a spot in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

 The Women was vigorously helmed by George Cukor, known at the time as a “woman’s director.” Cukor (whom I was honored to interview late in his life) could produce work of great subtlety, but The Women is hardly what you’d call subtle. Even the opening credits tell us exactly what to think about the cast of characters. Each of the main women is introduced by her married name: for example, Shearer is labeled as Mrs. Stephen Haines (Mary). And before we see a tell-tale closeup of the actress in character, there’s a quick image of an appropriate (female) animal. Shearer’s sensible, amiable Mary is depicted as a doe. Her soon-to-be archrival Crawford, in the role of a  shopgirl who’s after Mary’s husband, is shown as a sleek, cunning leopard. Third-billed Rosalind Russell, whose capricious character stirs up much of the trouble in the film, is a black cat. Others on-screen are represented by a monkey, a fox, a lamb, an owl, a cow (we then see everyone’s favorite confidante, played by Phyllis Povah, essentially chewing her cud), and an old mare (that would be homespun Marjorie Main as a Reno landlady).

 The outrageousness continues in the film’s opening scenes, set in and around a posh Manhattan health spa full of fawning uniformed attendants . The first thing we see, at the spa’s front door, is two pampered pooches snarling at one another. Quite soon it’s the woman themselves who are snarling, while gossiping over the manicure table and pretending to be each other’s best friends. One spa patron, gazing at another’s face through a magnifying contraption, sweetly declares, “Your skin makes the Rocky Mountains look like chiffon velvet.” Even Shearer’s appealing Mary will eventually learn, while on a trip to Reno to divorce her straying (but still loving) spouse, that there’s no special virtue in being nice: “I’ve had two years to grow claws . . . . Jungle Red.” And speaking of claws, the screen erupts with more than one physical cat-fight among the ladies who lunch.

 Does The Women have any lessons for us? I’m not so sure. True, good-hearted Mary does regain her equilibrium and her spouse, and Crystal heads back to the perfume counter. (These are spoilers, true, but can certainly be predicted from the film’s opening moments onward.) Still, virtue doesn’t exactly triumph. In many ways, it’s bitchery that reigns supreme. It’s curious to note that a 21^st century film remake was attempted. It took fifteen years to develop the project, which ultimately, when released in 2008, starred Meg Ryan, Annette Bening,, Eva Mendes, Debra Messing, Jada Pickett Smith, Carrie Fisher, Cloris Leachman, Debi Mazar Bette Midler, and Candice Bergen. Diane English of Murphy Brown fame wrote and directed, but her attempt at an update left critics (and audiences) distinctly unimpressed. 

 

Juliet . . . & (eventually) Romeo

Methinks that every generation has its own Romeo and Juliet, in which the tragic lovers reflect the concerns of the day. The 1936 film directed by George Cukor came out in the midst of the Great Depression. This was a time when young people going the movies craved glamour and sumptuous production values, things they couldn’t find in their own daily lives. Cukor’s MGM-based production featured major (though overaged) stars. Leslie Howard, as Romeo, was in his forties, and Norma Shearer, who played Juliet (and was married to studio honcho Irving Thalberg), was about 34, more than double the age of Shakespeare’s teenage heroine. The film was shot decorously, on elaborate sets, and given the full prestige treatment, complete with splashy roadshow engagements where illustrated programs were sold. (Yes, my mother bought one, and saved it for many decades)

 More than 20 years later, in 1957, a much-updated version of Romeo and Juliet became the toast of Broadway. This of course was West Side Story. The Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim musical reimagined the star-crossed lovers as recent New Yorkers from rival cultural backgrounds, with Tony as a Polish-American founder of a street gang called the Jets, and Maria, newly arrived from Puerto Rico, as naturally affiliated with the Sharks. The hit play became in 1964 a mega-hit film that gobsmacked everyone at my high school. We were much taken, in that era, with the promise of social justice for all, and the tragic story of lovers unable to transcend the enmity all around them hit us hard. (Steven Spielberg’s 2021 rethinking of the same musical has its merits, but its box-office reception was far less overwhelming, probably because the concerns of moviegoers had much changed in the intervening fifty-plus years.)

 What I consider MY Romeo and Juliet was the Franco Zeffirelli version that came out in the fraught year 1968. It was filmed on location in medieval Italian towns, and was the first cinematic version to feature actors close in age to Shakespeare’s actual characters. Zeffirelli apparently considered casting Paul McCartney and other rock gods of the era, but ended up with two unknowns, Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, who were cast when they were 16 and 15, respectively, but aged a year in the course of filming. We college students of the era, many caught up with our own first big romances, watched this movie in a sort of swoony daze, fully understanding the erotic passions of the two young lovers.

 Leave it to Baz Luhrmann to jazz up the Shakespearean story, giving it a kind of hipster sensibility. The year was 1996, and the stars were Leonardo DiCaprio (then 21) and Claire Danes (about 17). The feuding families were played as 20^th century Miami mobster types, with the Capulets now having some Latin roots. The setting was Verona Beach, and one key scene was played in a swimming pool. There’s still some well-spoken Shakespearean poetry, but also guns and party drugs.

 I’m reminiscing about all this because I’ve just seen the L.A. stage production of & Juliet, a London and Broadway hit musical that posits Juliet (waking in the tomb beside the dead Romeo) deciding not to kill herself for love. What follows is a riotous comedy in which pop songs from Max Martin are incorporated into Juliet’s romantic adventures in Paris. (Brittany Spears’ “Oops!... I Did It Again” becomes an acknowledgement that Juliet falls for cute guys a tad too quickly.) The many teens in the house cheered for Juliet’s developing feminist consciousness and for the “woke” gay empowerment motif that predominates. Me? I just felt rather old.

 

 

A Star is Born (Again)

Why, exactly, do we love movies about the making of movies? Showbiz seems like a glamorous , mysterious world that most of us aspire to enter. Many of us nurse private fantasies about a stardom we know we’ll never achieve, and there’s a perverse comfort in discovering that show business has its seamy side—and its tragic side—as well.  

 Curiously, in the early days of sound movies, most of the showbiz stories on the screen—pictures like Busby Berkeley’s 42^nd Street and Footlight Parade as well as chestnuts like Stage Door—were devoted to the challenge of putting on a theatrical production. It was Broadway that seemed most glamorous back then. Berkeley’s famous musical numbers, like the “By a Waterfall” extravaganza from Golddiggers of 1933, contained elements like scantily-clad chorines swimming in formation, gliding underwater, or sliding down waterfalls into welcoming lagoons. Such moments were often shot from above, and the joke was that they couldn’t possibly work in a Broadway theatre.

 Despite moviedom’s ongoing fascination with success on the Broadway stage, the 1930s also saw two popular flicks that chronicle a newcomer’s overnight rise to Hollywood stardom. In 1932, George Cukor directed Constance Bennett in What Price Hollywood?, the saga of a waitress who’s discovered by a film director with a drinking problem. She quickly achieves fame and fortune, while he spirals downward, with romantic complications galore. It was briefly popular, though no one pretended it was a realistic look at the film industry. A mere five years later, William Wellman directed Janet Gaynor and Frederic March in A Star is Born, which is quite similar to What Price Hollywood ? in its plotting, but adds the complication that Vicki Lester (née Esther Blodgett) loves and marries her champion, fading actor Norman Maine. The lavish production, which some say mirrored the troubled marriage of Barbara Stanwyck and Frank Fay, was enormously successful.

 Almost twenty years later, in 1954, Cukor took another crack at the material, which was to be his first musical and first Technicolor film. This version of A Star is Born showcases the powerful singing of Judy Garland, who was looking for a career comeback, as well as the dissolute complexity of the ageing thespian played by James Mason. (In his George Cukor’s People, film historian Joseph McBride calls this film, despite its studio butchering, Cukor’s very finest effort.)  The restored version I’ve just finished watching is 178 moments long, and there are some unusual tonal shifts from cheery musical comedy hijinks to downright tragedy, but this is the version to see. And hear: Garland belting “The Man That Got Away” is a moment not to be missed. (It was nominated for a Best Song Oscar, but—unthinkably—lost to the sweet, syrupy “Three Coins in the Fountain”).

 Making Esther into a singer opened the door for two further remakes featuring pop legends of the moment. The 1976 film, starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, shifts the familiar story to the world of rock ‘n’ roll, adding onscreen sex, a soupçon of infidelity, and a really memorable poster.  The year 2018 saw Bradley Cooper’s re-imagining of the story, with Lady Gaga garnering raves for her first serious acting role.

 Who knows when the next version will show up? Maybe—why not?—it could involve an older female star and an appealing young male newcomer. After all, there’s nothing that says that the woman can’t be the knowledgeable veteran of Hollywood. But we as audience members wouldn’t easily accept that as anything but grotesque. See, after all, Sunset Boulevard. 

 

Meeting George Cukor’s People

Many decades ago I was thrilled to interview film director George Cukor at his home (some called it a villa) in the hills above the Sunset Strip. He was then 80 years old, with a long string of hits behind him. After four previous nominations he’d finally won an Oscar for his lavish, charming screen adaptation of My Fair Lady. Late in life, he’d discovered the challenges of television, and had just finished directing close friend Katharine Hepburn in The Corn is Green. When we spoke, largely about his views on old Hollywood and its star system, he was unfailingly candid and witty. As he said to end our chat, “Don’t you think we’ve talked an awful lot? I think I’ve done it thin. And I sparkled!”

 Back in 1978, I’d seen many Cukor films in theatres and on television, but DVDs and streaming services did not yet exist. So I went into my quickly-arranged interview without an in-depth knowledge of Cukor’s career as a whole. Happily, I now possess a fascinating new book, George Cukor’s People: Acting for a Master Director, which puts Cukor’s fifty years in Hollywood into perspective. Its author is Joseph McBride, whose credentials make him the perfect choice to see Cukor whole. Joe has been, in the course of his own long career, a film journalist and a screenwriter. (Like me, he has a Roger Corman connection, and is credited with writing Rock n’ Roll High School.) He was also a novice but dedicated actor in Orson Welles’ last film, The Other Side of the Wind. He has taught film studies at San Francisco State for decades, and his twenty-plus books include much-admired studies of Hollywood directors John Ford, Frank Capra, and Billy Wilder. I haven’t read each and every McBride book, but I’m convinced George Cukor’s People is one of his very best.

 McBride avoided writing about  Cukor for many years, because he wasn’t sure how to approach the career of a man whose films covered such a wide range of styles and subjects. Recognizing that Cukor’s close work with actors was the key to his success, McBride has now chosen to zero in on the way he handled his stars, drawing out brilliant performances from luminaries ranging from John Barrymore (in Dinner at Eight) to Greta Garbo (in Camille) to Maggie Smith (Travels with My Aunt). He also identifies Cukor’s favorite subjects: dreamers, outsiders, the legend of Pygmalion creating (and then falling in love with) Galatea, and life as a performance.

 Of the book’s 28 chapters, I was perhaps most taken with McBride’s sensitive analysis of Cukor’s contributions in Gone With the Wind before he was fired by David O. Selznick, and with his appreciation for the brilliant Technicolor work in 1954’s A Star is Born, despite the film’s mangling by studio execs. His close analysis of Ingrid Bergman’s Oscar-winning performance in Gaslight  (he told her to visit a mental institution and study the patients) is memorable as well. And he ends with a tender paean to a TV film I too love: the teaming of a late-in-life  Katharine Hepburn and Laurence Olivier in 1975’s scintillating but sweet Love Among the Ruins.

 What makes McBride’s work so memorable is that he combines the erudition of a scholar and the savvy of an insider with the soul of a poet who loves movies. Here’s his take on Love Among the Ruins: it “serves as one of the purest expressions of Cukor’s career-long dedication to the transcendent power of the dreamer and the role of the theatre in heightening and improving upon reality.”  Beautifully said. 

 

Katharine Hepburn is (and is not) Sylvia Scarlett

I just finished watching an early cinematic romp starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Bringing Up Baby? Nope. The Philadelphia Story? Still nope.  While reading an advance copy of Joseph McBride’s fascinating George Cukor’s People: Acting for a Master Director, I became curious about a vintage film I had only barely heard of. Its name: Sylvia Scarlett. This 1935 flop was Cukor and Hepburn’s quixotic attempt to circumvent the Hollywood standards of the day. It’s the story of a young woman trying to protect her petty-criminal father by disguising herself as a young male as the two go on the lam, Hepburn’s transformation from female to male and back again was not taken well by the audiences of the day, nor by Hepburn’s studio, RKO, which demanded an inept explanatory prologue in which she appears in long braids and speaks in a meek girlish voice.

 The questions about gender and sexuality just beneath the film’s surface have belatedly made Sylvia Scarlett a favorite of feminists and some branches of the gay community. Personally, I consider it something of a mess, though a fascinating one. Various aspects of the plot are inconsistent, or just don’t make sense. Hepburn, though, is a marvel to watch. After that silly prologue, Hepburn in cropped hair and boys’ clothing is wonderfully convincing. The film makes full use of her natural athleticism (we see her jump over fences and climb through windows, and there’s a key instance when she plunges into a turbulent ocean to save someone from drowning). There are also those magical moments when she seems trapped by her disguise, trembling on the brink of declaring that she/he is in love. But when she decides to give in to her undeniable female self, dressing in a filmy frock and picture hat, we don’t believe her at all. Though Hepburn as pretty ingenue seems to enthrall the eligible men around her, it strikes the audience as a grotesque betrayal of her genuine personality.

 It was especially this film that caused Hollywood to label Hepburn “box office poison.” When she regained popularity, it was through roles that allowed her to be spirited and spunky, but also much more conventionally female, and ultimately content to accept a bit of male domination.  See, of course, her later outings with the hyper-male Spencer Tracy, and also her role opposite Cary Grant in Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story, wherein machismo ultimately wins the day. But the Sylvia Scarlett project hints that Hepburn, like the not-so-closeted Cukor, was shaped by a form of sexuality that was out of the ordinary, what we might call a complex mixture of yin and yang.

 The DVD version I watched, part of the Warner Brothers archive collection, has as an extra a short vintage travelogue that should delight every Angeleno. Advertised as A FitzPatrick Travel Talk, this Technicolor short is titled “Los Angeles, Wonder City of the West.” The L.A. about which the narrator enthuses (consistently calling my hometown “Las Angle-Us”) was then the country’s fifth largest city, boasting a population of 2 ¼ million souls. The travelogue begins with the lovely “Spanish” senoritas of Olvera Street, then coasts down “modern” thoroughfares, waxing lyrical about wacky features like the long-gone Brown Derby. Of course there’s a visit to several movie studios, complete with a sighting of Walt Disney himself, bouncing out of his modest headquarters to smile amiably for the camera, as “Whistle While You Work” plays on the soundtrack. We end up at the Hollywood Bowl, as some cuties and muscle-men rehearse a “cultural” dance performance that looks like pure kitsch. Those were the days!   

 

The Rashomon Mishmash that is “Les Girls”

Which Hollywood film borrows something from Akira Kurosawa’s groundbreaking Rashomon and something from Marlon Brando’s biker persona in The Wild One? Give up? It’s an MGM musical comedy from 1957, titled Les Girls.

 As a longtime fan of bright, splashy Hollywood musicals, I looked forward to seeing a film directed by George Cukor, scored by Cole Porter, and starring Gene Kelly. Sadly, none of their talents are fully on display here. The words and music by Porter (for whom this was a final motion picture) are totally forgettable. The charm and precision of Cukor (I just rewatched Adam’s Rib for the umpteenth time) are only a sometime thing. Kelly, about to move on to producing and directing, still looks good and dances well, but he seems in this film to be ageing out of the romantic lead category. The three “girls” of the title do each have their moments, but the film itself is an odd hybrid of outrageous shenanigans, romantic passion, and musical comedy shtik. Still, it’s not the worst way to pass an evening at home on the couch.

  The film begins in a London courtroom, with one very posh matron suing another for libel. It seems Sybil (now Lady Wren) has published a tell-all memoir of her years in a cabaret performance troupe. In her best-seller she has detailed the suicide attempt of Angele, one of her dance colleagues, when a passionate romance went awry. Cut to Paris, where younger versions of the elegant British Sybil (Kay Kendall) and the perky American Joy (Mitzi Gaynor) are featured in a popular stage revue led by Barry Nichols (Gene Kelly). They are quickly joined, both on-stage and in a not-too-shabby Paris apartment, by a new recruit, the flirtatious French Angele (Taina Elg). Angele has a devoted French suitor back home in the provinces, but she is all too quick to make the moves on Barry, who responds with enthusiasm. Disaster strikes when Angele’s provincial (but hugely wealthy) fiancé shows up with his parents, thinking she’s in the nation’s capital to study nursing. She panics, ruins the evening’s performance, as well as—apparently—her romantic future on both fronts. Sadly, suicide seems the only way out, but she’s rescued just in time.

 Back in the British courtroom, we now get Angele’s testimony, which exonerates her completely while flashing back to Sybil’s (hilarious) drunken antics in that Paris apartment. Her condition prompts fisticuffs between the supportive Barry and Sybil’s own longtime suitor, a starchy British lord. Kendall’s uproarious tipsiness in this section reminds us what a boon she was to the entertainment world before her all-too-early death at age 37. The flashback ends with an account of a suicide attempt not by Angele but by Sybil herself.

 On Day 3 of the trial, Barry himself shows up as a surprise witness. In HIS version (this is how the Rashomon analogy fits in), neither Sybil nor Angele successfully captured his romantic attention. And the suicide attempts in each woman’s courtroom story have a very different explanation, which winds up ending the trial with good will restored all around. Or is it?

 How does Marlon Brando fit into all this? There are, of course, a number of dance numbers in the film, all choreographed by Hollywood legend Jack Cole. Some are lurid, one tries hard to be risqué, all are well danced. But the best of them features Kelly and Mitzi Gaynor. She’s a lovelorn café proprietor; he’s a biker (like Brando’s Johnny) with a black leather jacket and a gang of henchmen. Things quickly get steamy: definitely worth the price of admission. 

 

How Franco Zeffirelli Taught Us About Love

See below for the 1936 poster

When I think about the late Franco Zeffirelli, the lush romantic music of Nino Rota enters my head, my mind flies back to the year 1968, and I’m once again young and in love. Of course I’m thinking of one of Zeffirelli’s earliest and best films, Romeo and Juliet. Over a long career much of his most acclaimed (not to mention most controversial) work involved opera, Nonetheless I think Zeffirelli’s opulent touch was extraordinarily well suited to the filming (within the walls of medieval Italian towns) of Shakespeare’s great early tragedy. .

When, as a college student, I first watched Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, my reference point was the classic 1936 black-&-white version from MGM. As befit one of Irving Thalberg’s prestige projects, the cast was chockful of stars from the MGM stock company: John Barrymore as Mercutio! Basil Rathbone as Tybalt! Edna May Oliver as Juliet’s nurse! Even Andy Devine in the small comic role of the nurse’s servant! Young Romeo was played by not-so-young Leslie Howard, who at 43 was still a go-to guy for romantic leading roles. His Juliet was 34-year-old Norma Shearer, a demure beauty who just happened to be Mrs. Irving Thalberg. It’s by no means a bad film, but under the direction of George Cukor the actors are formal and a bit stiff, playing at the Bard with a capital B.  There’s no way that anyone of my generation would have connected emotionally with this story of long-in-the-tooth star-crossed lovers. It was something we could watch dutifully, as for an assignment in an English class.

Then in 1968, at a time of high emotion for the youth of America, along came Zeffirelli to transform the time-worn story. Yes, the settings were beautiful and the well-choreographed street brawls unmistakably alive. But what really sold this version was the decision to cast in the leading roles actual teenagers not far removed in age from the lovers in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Leonard Whiting was 18 years old when the film was released, while Olivia Hussey was 15, just two years older than the storied Juliet. Their shaggy hair and youthful impetuousness made them seem like our peers. At a time when we were discovering love, sex, and the fact that our parents weren’t always right, their on-screen passion struck a chord with Baby Boomers. (I’ve since learned that the movie’s morning-after scene, with a nude Whiting artfully stretched out on the coverlet of the bridal bed, came as a delightful shock to certain young men who thereby discovered their own sexual leanings.)

One last example of how Cukor and Zeffirelli’s approach differed: Romeo first espies Juliet as she dances at the Capulet ball. In that instant, his infatuation with a certain Rosaline fades away as he reverently murmurs, “Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!” In the Cukor version, Romeo is watching a formal  dance number in which Juliet, framed by a symmetrical arrangement of handmaidens, sways prettily while (as I recall) holding a floral wreath. Zeffirelli shows us instead a huge circle of Capulets, all shapes and sizes, all happily executing the moves of some period couple-dance. Juliet is not the best dancer of the bunch, and the dance formation doesn’t set her off as a rare object, or a prima donna. But she’s young, she’s lovely, and she’s just the right age . . .  so of course Romeo falls in love on the spot. .

It’s the youthful exuberance of love that Zeffirelli shows us. Perhaps the film may not hold up today, but what youthful love affair does?