DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter March 2023
Enduring masterpiece
The best films are poetry. Images and sounds resonate with harmonic purity in a viewer’s thrall. With or without a narrative, poetry is a melodic swirl of ideas that accumulate to a common purpose or instill within the reader that same swirl of thoughts, comparisons and enlightenment. In film, narrative often fuels momentum, but it is the fusion of those images and sounds that, when they are forged and fashioned with artistic skill, blend to create a greater and complete work, one that implants itself in a viewer’s consciousness as a multitude of ideas, and lingers in its beauty long after the film is ended, like a spirit. William Shakespeare wrote poetry, and the dialog in his plays are poems, words that flow so smoothly that one is barely conscious of the rhymes or the meter when one hears the characters exchange them. When masterful filmmakers have adapted Shakespeare plays for the screen, they have brought with them the added artistry of image and sound design to underscore and embellish the profound impact of Shakespeare’s words, while utilizing the storytelling advantages of cinema to crystallize his narratives.
Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 masterpiece, Romeo and Juliet, originally produced by Paramount, has been released on Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection (UPC#715515281614, $40). We reviewed Paramount’s DVD in Jan 01. The monophonic sound has recording limitations, including an occasional scratchiness in the dialog, that cannot be overcome, although the solidity of the BD playback is a strong improvement over the DVD’s audio. The picture, letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1, is considerably improved over the DVD, which was nice looking but inconsistent. The image on the Blu-ray is solid, pure and accurate from beginning to end. Running 138 minutes, the presentation has an Intermission card at its halfway point. There are optional English subtitles.
Zeffirelli was still just beginning his film career when he made Romeo and Juliet, his second film and his second Shakespeare adaptation, but he never improved upon what he achieved with that film and, at his best, only came close to equaling its beauty and impact a handful of times—which is no small accomplishment, to be sure. Having previously made the Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor Taming of the Shrew (Apr 00), he had a comfortable familiarity with the basics of making a Shakespeare film—not just in managing the dialog and truncating the narrative to accommodate the demands of a popular motion picture, but embracing the value of the period detail and dressing. He also employed Nina Rota for the music, which became not just a cornerstone to both movies, but a blood flow, as critical to the life of the films as Shakespeare’s dialog.
Yes, you won’t get an ‘A’ on the test if you only watch the film to study for your English exam on the play. A major character—Juliet’s other suitor, Paris—does not get into a scrabble with Romeo at the end, nor is he killed, because Zeffirelli recognized that for a modern boxoffice, the focus had to be on the two youngsters, Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, without distraction, so that—spoiler alert—they can both die without undermining or disappointing the expectations of the audience. Perhaps more disconcerting, because we have contemplated it for decades and still do not know the answer other than the possibility that the scenarists, Zeffirelli, Franco Brusati and Masolino D’Amico, did not grow up in an English-speaking environment and thus did not comprehend its importance, Juliet’s lament, “Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say goodnight till it be morrow,” was left either penciled out or on the cutting room floor.
And yet, the film’s richness is enduring, and offers more pleasures with every viewing. When it came to the period details of the time and the place that were to be included, Zeffirelli excelled. Because so many of the filmmakers on his team were Italian and the production was staged in Italy, even though the cast and the script were English, the film is a comprehensive realization of Shakespeare’s vision. The details are the ideas (we never noticed it before, but mister and missus Capulet can’t stand each other—no wonder they only had one child—and every chance he gets, Zeffirelli includes bits of business that enforce their animosity or mister Capulet’s roving eye)—from the fabrics and the costumes, to the beauty of the dialog and how it has been transposed from page to enactment, underscored by the unendingly sweet redolence of Rota’s compositions. At its center are the youthful actors and the thrilling humanity of their performances, preserved in time not on a page but on a seemingly living screen that, thanks to the Blu-ray, will never age or wither.
Speaking of aging, Whiting and Hussey sit for a wonderful 2016 screening appearance, answering questions about their experiences making the film (this was before they filed a recently publicized suit against Paramount about their underage nude scenes—in every interview they do, they claim the nudity was fine) and how their lives have unfolded. Running 33 minutes, the interview is wonderful not just for the information they share and the clear indication that they are still very close friends, but for the contrast they provide to their younger selves, in a fervent demonstration of where life can take you. Also featured is a somewhat more tense 1967 interview the two sat for in England before the film came out, running 17 minutes, in which the interviewer badgers them about what they are expecting from that same life, along with a 5-minute clip from a documentary about Zeffirelli that includes behind-the-scenes footage, and a trailer.
Love to love you, Lovecraft
American International Pictures’ 1970 answer to Rosemary’s Baby with the inspired insertion of H.P. Lovecraft’s mythology, The Dunwich Horror, has been released on Blu-ray by Arrow Video (UPC#760137117209, $40). Dean Stockwell is a shifty occult worshiper who hypnotizes a college student played by Sandra Dee and spends the entire 88 minutes of the movie getting her ready for the ceremony they are going to perform to either open a passageway to an evil dimension or let the monster who resides there get his groove on. The elderly Ed Begley is of all things the hero, an occult professor who gradually pieces together what is going on and acts to prevent Stockwell’s character from succeeding (in that sense, the film is also similar to Dracula). Lloyd Bochner, Sam Jaffe and Talia Shire (back when she was still a Coppola) co-star. The film has glimpses of nudity and solarized images of monsters (if you can’t see them clearly, they don’t look fakey, except that everybody watching knows that), but is rather slow moving. This is compensated with a reasonable effectiveness, however, through its subliminal messaging. Essentially, what happens at the end is that Stockwell’s character and Dee’s scantily clad character are on an altar, getting ready for, let’s say, spiritual intercourse, and down below, not just Begley’s character and the cops, but the townspeople as well, are scrambling up the hillside to stop them. As the prominently phallic logs behind them suggest, the adults want to stop the kids from having sex, and if that isn’t the core of an AIP drive-in horror film message, we don’t know what is. The film was directed by Daniel Haller (from one of Curtis Hansen’s first significant screenplays), and was produced by Roger Corman, who understood such filmmaking very well.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.