Romeo and Juliet
1954: Renato Castellani

This production, almost unknown today, has some real virtues. It has relatively few “name” actors, other than the legendary John Gielgud as the Chorus (a role he takes up again in the BBC Shakepeare version twenty-four years later), whose role is really outside the drama, and Sebastian Cabot as Capulet. The rest of the roles are less well-known. They are adequately filled, however, and allow the story to shine through with relatively little interpretive spin. Susan Shentall played the role of Juliet and, as far as I can discover, virtually nothing else. She was twenty when the film was made: still too old, really, for the fourteen-year-old Juliet, but less conspicuously out of the age bracket than many another.

For its day, this is a very cinematic presentation, shot on location, without any of the stage conventions that some viewers find problematic. It is regrettably rather considerably cut, still, but if you are looking for a “real movie” version other than the Zeffirelli, this is a reasonable place to look. One might find a bit more contrast with the Howard/Shearer version from 1936.

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