YMMV / Romeo and Juliet (1968)

• Americans Hate Tingle: Despite the film's warm reception everywhere else, it got slated in England for making changes to the play — particularly cutting out the fight between Romeo and Paris in the crypt.
• Audience-Coloring Adaptation: For many, this is the definitive version of Romeo & Juliet. The 1936 film is respected for having classically trained cast members well known for their theatre work at the time, but the actors are much too old, being in their late thirties to forties or even older (in part due to the regulations at the time ruling out actual teens acting out romance), and since it's in black and white, this may unfortunately but understandably deter younger audiences. The 1996 film has a fan following but also a considerable Broken Base due to its then-contemporary Setting Update to a modern city in The '90s, including MTV stylings and other stuff. And the 2013 version kept the Renaissance period setting and was shot on location in Italy too, but mixed Shakespeare's dialogue with modernizations, rewrites and pastiche additions both subtle and blatant, which ticked off many Shakespearean purists and educators in ways even the 1996 one didn't, and it thus quickly faded from public consciousness. So while this version changed or left out a bit too, it tends to be regarded as the best movie version so far, as well as the most common choice for School Study Media.
• Award Snub:
  • While the film collected Academy Awards for its cinematography and costume design, Nino Rota's score, which has gone down in history, didn't receive so much as a nomination.
  • The film was overlooked in the acting categories as well, even at ceremonies like the BAFTAs, where only Pat Heywood and John McEnery got nominations. Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting were completely ignored, despite the film's critical and commercial success arguably owing most of that to their performances.
• Awesome Music:
  • The entire score by Nino Rota, especially the music that plays over Juliet's death (titled appropriately "O Happy Dagger") brilliantly underscores the tragedy of the whole thing.
  • "What is a Youth?" sung by Glen Weston at the masquerade ball, perfectly capturing the flurry of young love and the bittersweet end to Romeo and Juliet's lives. The version sung by Leonard Whiting is just as good.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: The film is best remembered for having the lovers actually in bed together post-nuptials — which is only implied in the play — while Juliet appears very briefly topless. There's also the urban legend (false) that Olivia Hussey was refused into the premiere for being too young to see the nudity.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Mercutio spouting gibberish at the beginning of Act 3, scene 1.
• Can't Un-Hear It:
  • Better With Bob? called Leonard Whiting the definitive Romeo. The fact that he barely made any more films just adds to it.
    "Leonard Whiting lets us see Romeo's sympathetic side — where we can easily tell that he's a kind and caring boy at heart who's just caught up in the passion of the situation."
  • There are plenty who consider Olivia Hussey the definitive Juliet, both for her beauty and spirited performance that brings plenty of wit and humour to the famous Ingenue.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Pat Heywood in her film debut promptly steals the show with her funny and heartfelt performance as the Nurse. She was even nominated for a BAFTA, alongside John McEnery (Mercutio) in the Supporting Acting categories.
• Estrogen Brigade: Plenty of young female viewers turned up at the cinema to Squee over the Cast Full of Pretty Boys in the youthful Leonard Whiting, Michael York, John McEnery and Bruce Robinson — all of whom are in tight breeches for most of the run time (and Romeo gets a gratuitous ass shot).
• Fandom Rivalry: Along with Baz Luhrmann's adaptation — as the two most successful film versions, over which is better. Both were hits with the young demographics of their day, so there are often debates over which one is better.
• Genius Bonus: The lyrics of the song "What is a Youth?" come from other Shakespeare plays, notably Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Olivia Hussey plays a girl who flees one arranged marriage and another marriage ends badly. She had two failed marriages, the first of which happened when she was very young. However, she did end up Happily Married to her third husband.
  • The Capulets are marrying Juliet off to Paris to secure wealth and political favor. This can be sad to watch if you read Olivia Hussey's autobiography where she revealed how underpaid she and her co-stars were — despite spending two years making and promoting the film.
  • There's a comedy scene of the Montague boys harassing the Nurse, complete with Mercutio giving her an unwanted kiss. One of the actors in this scene, Bruce Robinson, would suffer unwanted advances from director Franco Zeffirelli on set and eventually base the lecherous Uncle Monty in Withnail and I on this experience.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Leonard Whiting looks strikingly similar to a young Zac Efron. Efron's Star-Making Role was Troy Bolton, the Romeo equivalent in Disney's adaptation of the story, High School Musical.
  • Pat Heywood was Younger Than They Look (only 36) playing the Nurse. Olivia Hussey has joked that some decades later, she now looks young for her age.
  "She looked older when she was young."
  • Macbeth (1971) was greenlit following the success of this. Olivia Hussey would later star with Jon Finch, who played the title role, as lovers in the film version of Death on the Nile. Michael York (Tybalt) was almost in that too.
  • Olivia Hussey admitted to briefly dating Leonard Whiting during filming, but both quickly realized that they were Better as Friends. So their real-life romance lasted just as long as the one in the movie, From a Certain Point of View.
  • The hymn sung at Juliet's wedding and her (first) funeral is a mixture of the Latin hymns/prayers Ave Maris Stella (Hail, Star of the Sea), Ave Maria (Hail Mary), and Salve Regina. All three of these venerate the Virgin Mary. Nine years later, Olivia Hussey would go on to PLAY the Virgin Mary in Zeffirelli's own Jesus of Nazareth.
• Just Here for Godzilla: For some, Nino Rota's score is the best thing about the movie, and the main reason to watch it. Especially the famous love theme.
• Memetic Mutation: Following on from the above, when Leonard Whiting appeared at a 50th anniversary Q&A, cue jokes about "now we know what Zac Efron will look like when he's older".
• Once Original, Now Common:
  • Casting two actual teenagers playing teenage leads was revolutionary for its day, according to GradeSaver:
  The one major milestone for the film was that for the first time on the big screen, the titular teenage lovers were actually played by teenagers, ones with whom those teens making up the target audience could identify much more readily than the 30-something-year-old actors cast in previous versions. Romeo is first introduced in a manner that was quite consistent with the “flower children” suddenly popping up all over the place, while Juliet seems to reflect the very decade of the 1960s by evolving from naïve conservatism into full-on rebellion against the traditions established by her elders. As is the case with way, way too many movies made in the 1960s, much of the details left out of the script are provided through extensive montage sequences, but this cinematic device does not make Romeo and Juliet hopelessly dated like so many other movies stuck in that decade.
  • The honeymoon scene was quite shocking in its day because no one expected actual nudity from the teenage actors playing the titular characters. Viewed today, compared with the later portrayals of sexuality on screen becoming more explicit, it looks chaste.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Robert Stephens has just three scenes in the relatively minor part of The Prince, but his commanding presence and powerful delivery of the line "All are punish-ed!!" make quite the impression.
  • The bard Leonardo, played by Bruno Filliponi but dubbed by Glen Weston, only appears at the Capulet ball to sing "What Is A Youth?" but of course is a key part of the film.
• Periphery Demographic: The film acquired a sizable fan base of teenagers and young adults, due to the title roles being played by teenagers for the first time in film history.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Tybalt, played by Michael York, will be very recognisable to fans of Cabaret (Brian Roberts), Logan's Run (Logan 5), and Austin Powers (Basil Exposition).
  • Milo O'Shea (Friar Laurence) would get infamy for Barbarella (which he filmed at the same time as this) where he played the villain, Durand-Durand (not the group, Duran Duran).
  • Horror fans will know Olivia Hussey more for Black Christmas (1974) (she had such an encounter with Steve Martin).
  • Bruce Robinson (Benvolio) later became the director of Withnail and I. Uncle Monty was even based off Franco Zeffirelli.
• Testosterone Brigade: Olivia Hussey attracted plenty of male admirers for her role as Juliet. Even if you look up clips on YouTube, half the comments will be gushing about her beauty.
• Tough Act to Follow: As one of the most successful Shakespeare films with critics and audiences alike, other adaptations of Romeo & Juliet have found it hard to follow. This may be why Baz Luhrmann's version went for outrageous stylism and a modern setting, to better distinguish it from this (it's the only other film version to be as famous). The film is also as of 2023 the last Shakespeare adaptation to get a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars.
• Values Dissonance: Featuring nudity from teenage actors — which was still happening in films in the 1990s and 2000s (see American Beauty and The Hole). But what is really shocking is the publicity happily lying to say that Olivia Hussey was fifteen — when she was actually sixteen at the time the nude scene was shot. Indeed, in 2022, both actors filed a lawsuit against Paramount on the basis that they were pressured into nudity.

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