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Franco Zeffirelli is primarily remembered for his 1968 film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. The film is remembered as the origin for the next fifty or so years of the works of Shakespeare in the film industry as a reliable source of prestige cinema material! What history seems to have conveniently forgotten is the fact that Zeffierelli’s film, though incredibly successful and nominated for Best Picture alongside many Oscars, and greatly influential almost immediately, was his second adaptation in two years. In 1967, the director’s second film in English and only his second overall work was his first English film, which was an adaptation of The Taming Of The Shrew. But one has to wonder Is it as infamous as the 1929 feature? Surely it could not have been as dreadful, right?
Someone’s history alone would be enough to raise eyebrows. However, if I lived in 1967, I could easily list quite a few reasons why this would be a colossal failure. For starters, the play itself, The Taming of the Shrew. It is one of the least elegant, most outdated Shakespeare plays, suffering from a second half that repeats ad and ends in an incredibly difficult final sequence that can be interpreted as a satire of patriarchal norms, or as I would guess, an overjoyed resignation to them. Lastly, there is the issue in that this is one of the comedies, which seem to be much more difficult at the box office compared to the tragedies or the histories. For sound cinema, in over ninety years, there is only one that is universally accepted to be at least fairly decent and that is the 1993 Much Ado About Nothing.
Back in 1967, perhaps the situation wouldn’t have posed such a threat as the fact that Shakespeare had yet to inspire any major mainstream films since the 1930s, which, if we’re honest, were largely unremarkable. Additionally, The Taming of the Shrew had, after some cast changes, ended up as a vehicle for real-life couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (who had no background in Shakespearean-trained acting but had enough charisma for me to wonder why she needed the first scenes to be redone), who only a few years back starred opposite each other in the blueprint for all costume dramas, the notorious disaster Cleopatra.
The Taming of the Shrew has a dreadful reputation, but a good reputation at the same time mainly for being a successful movie. The film version of the story showcases how a tale can be chopped and modified to an extent where it seems like it was originally meant to be watched in film form. Fortunately, the audience does not feel like it was intended to be designed on the basis of Elizabethan theatrical traditions. Unusually, the film leaves out the entire play within a play concept, which was decisively a good decision. It would be misleading to categorize the edit as perfect. Throughout the first ten minutes, Lucentio and his servant Tranio. Lucentio, who is a young William York, is shown as the noble Lord and scholar who arrives in Padua as the film shows the card ‘introducing’ on the screen. From these ten minutes, he seems to be one of the main characters in the entire story. The collection of audience may or may not be familiar with this, but Lucentio takes on the role of a teacher of Latin while Lucentio’s servant takes his place and disguises himself, all in order to get the attention of Bianca Pyne. The second daughter of the rich Baptista Hordern is definitely none other than the one who lies, posing as her elder sister.
But Baptista has made it clear that Bianca has a lot of suitors, but they are not allowed to approach her until he has married his eldest daughter, the headstrong and shrewish Katharina (Taylor). Enter Petruchio (Burton) a gouty, unscrupulous libertine and golddigger only too willing to tolerate a bit of wrath provided he can, in fact, take a lion’s share of Betrista’s wealth. Baptista undoubtedly has some fortune that comes with the temperamental Katharina siding him.
Now back to that hastily attempted rearrangement of the material The three screenwriters (who very generously credited Shakespeare onscreen, claiming that “without him, they would have been at a loss for words”) have done away with the Lucentio-Bianca material, which results in those opening minutes with York feeling like a bad prologue. And that is unfortunate York isn’t as great here as he would be in Romeo and Juliet (where, in my opinion, he delivers the greatest screen performance of Shakespeare) but he does manage to impress quite a bit. He captures brilliantly the childish wonder of a young man who comes to a new city for the first time and falls in love, and speaks with such a rapidity that shows not only I wonder how the comedies are depicted on-screen, but also that he understands the importance of attempting to make the plays work onscreen. And false prologues, for that matter, are always wrong.
In any case, the film, as it has to be, is almost completely left to Burton and Taylor and Zeffirelli has made the important but basic decision of treating them as participants in a modern slapstick comedy. Taylor ever so snarlingly snaps out her lines with an undercurrent of rage which suggests that she hadn’t fully vented her fury from the previous year’s production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? while at the same time rolling her eyes and gawping in disbelief as Burton. For his part, that actor is visibly enjoying himself ripping Petruchio’s character to shreds and turning him into a vulgar braggart, partially Falstaff and fully Petruchio, ebullient and hammy and drunkenly stupified. On some level, it is at least somewhat a nonstandard take on the role, and it does pose some issues it’s less clear than it ought to be that Petruchio is also performing, in his own way, to “tame” Kate. But it is, in its own right, solely delightful, one of the most spirited and casual performances by Burton I have ever seen in a movie, which happens to be a role that requires the utmost level of fantasy, and was a clear Geoffrey’s example for someone who understands every single word of Shakespearean dialogue and knows what he is talking about when that character says it.
The puns in The Taming of the Shrew may be difficult to appreciate, but Burton manages to bring them to life and enjoyably narrates them.
For the most part, and this is really crucial to how the entire thing functions, Zeffirelli doesn’t have Taylor and Burton play this like a comedy (which is not true of the side characters, where Lynch even at one point breaks the fourth wall to deliver a boggled-eyed aside to the cameras). Instead, he allows the stuff of a comedy to happen around them Mildly wacky sound effects (and with the best, a lightning strike punctuating a meaningful line of speech), plenty of broad physical comedy, copious amounts of gurning by background characters. For Taylor and Burton, this continues to be a battle of wits, with emphasis on the battle they excel in playing the initial part of the relationship, which remains hostile and tense, with Kate being the most furiously vicious. This means that the softening of that character is a much harder sell the notorious monologue at the end is especially difficult to parse as a result but the post-marriage part of the play is not as good as the nasty-minded “courtship” anyway, so it is not like it is a huge loss.
The second aspect that feels very much developed is the setting. Some of the street sets are wonderfully designed, too beautifully busy to be real, and worthy of an Oscar nomination, and the filmmakers have them permanently wet with rain. It’s not “realistic” for one thing, Padua and Verona are filled with English language signs which instantly shatters whatever false illusion this film seeks to create, but other than the lighting and overall cleanliness, there is a certain uneasy artificialness to everything as well, but neither is it overly impressive and staged. The mise en scene is full of stuff, with a lot of furniture and props, and a plethora of corners packed with people and things. It is neither grime poverty nor order with a complex surrounding Kate and Petruchio. This allows the film’s dramatic setting to provide context for the narrative.
Yes, that is the word living. The Taming of the Shrew is above everything else a lively film, fast in its pace, always active visually always noisy (the music by Nino Rota is a delight in itself), and full of opportunities for the actors to do all sorts of business. Maybe he has little anxiety in making his film prim and dignified because he is adapting a comedy and it is, after all, this comedy. It’s rough, it’s loud, and even if it seldom or never raises to the level of “funny” it’s still brimming with life and energy. I don’t think the movie makes much effort to deal with most of the challenges an adaptation of this play should spend time thinking about, but at the end of the day, it is a super lively film something that too many Shakespearean adaptations in the later half of the century have unfortunately neglected to be in their attempt to be admired.
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