With this in mind, I believe Franco Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet" is the most exciting film of Shakespeare ever made. Not because it is greater drama than Olivier's "Henry V," because it is not. Nor is it greater cinema than Welles' "Falstaff." But it is greater Shakespeare than either because it has the passion, the sweat, the violence, the poetry, the love and the tragedy in the most immediate terms I can imagine. It is a deeply moving piece of entertainment, and that is possibly what Shakespeare would have preferred.

To begin with, Zeffirelli's film is the first production of "Romeo and Juliet" I am familiar with in which the romance is taken seriously. Always before, we have had actors in their 20s or 30s or even older, reciting Shakespeare's speeches to each other as if it were the words that mattered. They do not, as anyone who has proposed marriage will agree. Often enough, one cannot even remember what was said at moments of great emotion; the words are outpourings of the soul.

And that is the effect Zeffirelli achieves in two almost impossible scenes: the balcony scene and the double suicide in the tomb. There are some lines in Shakespeare too famous for their own good. When Hamlet winds up for "to be, or not to be," the entire audience is there ahead of him, waiting for those lines, watching them come down the track. The same is true of Juliet's "Romeo, Romeo, oh, wherefore art thou, Romeo?" The very words bring back memories of campfire skits.

It is to the credit of Zeffirelli and his young players (Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey) that they have brought the lines and characters of Romeo and Juliet back to life again. In a theater filled to capacity Saturday night, not one single person found it necessary to snicker when Juliet asked so simply where Romeo was; we were looking for him, too.

The success of the film depends upon Whiting and Miss Hussey. Zeffirelli reportedly interviewed hundreds of young actors and actresses before choosing them; if so, then this is the first movie "talent search" worth the trouble. They are magnificent. We can see why Zeffirelli didn't want older actors. The love between Romeo and Juliet, and the physical passion that comes with it, are of that naive and hopeless intensity only those in love for the very first time can comprehend.

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