Franco Zeffirelli (1967)
The trains weren’t running so Sally and I got a cab to Waterloo and the pleasant driver went a pleasant route, up through Parsons Green and King’s Road and with a great view of Battersea Power Station as we went along Chelsea Embankment. It was a lovely afternoon to look at London from a car – sunny and, for reasons unclear, with the traffic pretty light (something to do with the papal visit – but what exactly?). We had a nice lunch at Le Pain Quotidien before going to BFI. I’ve a memory of watching The Taming of the Shrew on television with my parents one Christmas Day (I guess in the mid-seventies) and of all three of us enjoying it. My enjoyment may have had more to do with the experience of happy family viewing than with the quality of the film but I remember one of my parents – I’m not sure which – saying how good Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were, in a you-have-to-hand-it-to-them way. But when Sally asked, less than halfway through this afternoon’s show, if I’d had enough, I knew I had and we walked out. Part of me felt disloyal to Burton and Taylor, as well as to my parents, but Franco Zeffirelli’s film is execrable.
It’s hard to find any redeeming qualities. Perhaps it was just a poor print but Oswald Morris’s photography is so dark-toned that the expensive sets and costumes (by Danilo Donati, with Taylor’s clothes by Irene Sharaff) were sometimes hard to make out. In the opening titles, the screenplay credit, to Paul Dehn, Suso Cecchi D’Amico and Zeffirelli, is followed by an ineffable joke acknowledgement to Shakespeare – ‘without whom they [the screenwriters] would have been lost for words’. The words that Dehn et al may have invented yield lines like ‘Out of my way, fool!’ This gives a hint of Zeffirelli’s strenuously rumbustious staging of the crowd scenes in Padua and there’s so much lusty laughter from the characters that you feel they’re needed in the audience. Coarse acting from Victor Spinetti (Hortensio) is only to be expected but good people like Michael Hordern (Baptista) and Alan Webb (Gremio) and even Cyril Cusack (Grumio) aren’t much better. In his first role on the big screen, Michael York (Lucentio) looks better than he sounds; even so, York’s wooden readings are preferable to the giggles of Natasha Pyne (Bianca), also making her cinema debut.
I kept reassuring myself that everything would change once Burton and Taylor arrived but I was wrong. Burton’s braggadocio as Petruchio, in what we saw anyway, is lazily obvious. Taylor, not an easily intimidated actress, is disappointingly uncertain as Katharina – she seems to be shouting in desperation. Both Burton and Taylor look too old for their roles too – which reinforces the impression of a bad theatre production. Except for Alfred Lynch (Tranio), who doesn’t disgrace himself, the acting has a pantomimic broadness – without the pleasures to be had from pantomime. Nino Rota’s score (the film was being shown as part of BFI’s Rota season) makes little impression – perhaps that’s the best that can be said for anything in the movie.
18 September 2010
