Romeo and Juliet

In Brief: If there must be film versions of Mr. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet — and, since the movies have been churning them out in various forms for 116 years, it seems we must — then Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 version is as good as any and better than most. It should, however, be noted that it is very much of its time with its youthful cast looking like they stepped off the cover of Tiger Beat magazine. Even at the time, it was sometimes derided as the "Pepsi Generation" version of the play. I'm not at all sure that's necessarily a bad thing, but I'm well past finding the story a great tragedy of star-crossed lovers, and more on the side of viewing the title characters as self-dramatizing hormonal teenagers. That, I know, makes me a curmudgeon, but them's the breaks. Of course, one of the big things at the time of its release — at least among the teenage girls I knew — was the film's then-startling (now tepid) nudity, specifically Romeo's bare backside. (I'm sure this fueled many a youthful fantasy — and in the name of culture, too.) It briefly thrust Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey into the spotlight but didn't exactly propel them to stardom (Hussey's next best-known film is the 1974 slasher picture Black Christmas). Regardless, this is a reasonable version of the play.