The Taming of the Shrew [1967]

I'm watching 50-some odd Shakespeare adaptations this year and then writing about them for My Year of Shakespeare.

What if the two sloppiest people you know started dating? What if they were both so high strung that it was exhausting being around them all the time? What if they weren't acting and that's what they were really like? If you're anything like me, your response to those questions was "yes yes my twenties were spent in bars, what of it?"; if you aren't, you probably thought of this specific production of The Taming of the Shrew.

Summary

For most of this post series, I'm going to try to surmise the plot based solely on the adaptation; I don't have a deep bench with Shakespeare with the possible exception of Romeo & Juliet. As a structuring principle, I'm borrowing the Just King Things five-sentence summary approach.

[1] Every doofus in Padua, including a freshly-arrived scholar Lucentio, wants to get fresh with Bianca, the obedient daughter of Baptista Minola, who is so pure it is even reflected in her name; unfortunately for them, she has an elder sister, Katherina, who is a strong-willed independent woman that must be wed before anyone can court Bianca. [2] The doofuses enter a conspiracy with the local messy estate inheritor, Petruchio, that he should marry Katherina. [3] Petruchio aggressively pursues Katherina while ingratiating himself with her father; he torments her until she gives up entirely and her personality changes to that of a prisoner. [4] Meanwhile there is a bunch of buffoonery happening with the doofus conspiracy that ultimately doesn't matter as the one of them who the least character-actor coded — Lucentio — becomes the appropriate suitor for Bianca. [5] In the final scene, in a wager that the dim bulbs of Kalshi and DraftKings would salivate at the nonsensicality of, Katherina comes when summoned by her husband and explains to the audience that it's good, actually, to have your personality broken and become subservient to the whims of a now-rich drunk.

My Thoughts

I didn't love this movie; some of that was the performances and technical storytelling are very of-their-time, much of my ire was carried in the story. I find it hard to hear stories about the virtue of subservience at the expense of ones own joy, thoughts, or art, to keep those stories hallowed. While the farce of the suitors could've been more fleshed out and consequential — I did cheat a bit and read a synopsis of the play itself, in other adaptations it is indeed more consequential — Zeffirelli instead cuts back to check in on Petruchio & Katherina. It makes sense, Burton & Taylor being the draw of the movie, but it also makes sense in the negative because of the rest of the cast, the only one who seems able to actually act is Michael York; he isn't doing his best here.

Performance-wise, Elizabeth Taylor turns in a stilted one; her cartoonish over-acting when "acting out" was uncharacteristically large for film — I'm of the impression the standard at the time was large performances for stage or television, subtle for cinema — and her fits of rage and pique throughout the first third of the movie would make even the most local of community theater players blush. At the same time, her earnestness when yearning or (in the last third of the movie) kept is actually quite compelling. I don't know if I'd seen any of her films before, and watching this it became clear why she was the face and name that could sell luxury & poise for fifty or so years. It's more than a little frustrating that it was used in service of conveying the moral that "the violent system we've got is good, actually" to seemingly everyone but extremely normal opinion haver Harold Bloom.

Richard Burton looks to be having a blast playing an absolute menace in this movie, with the world's worst false beard (at least I assumed it was false; it may just be your run-of-the-mill crime against facial hair). While his performance is a bit one-note, the role is arguably a bit one-note; after all, his entire plot arc is "I inherited my father's estate and want to get married; I don't have to change or grow. The end, no moral."

Everyone else? I think this movie is a great case study for showing what is meant by "character actor" since the term has somewhat drifted since its inception and become fuzzy for modern audiences. The assorted doofuses of Padua perform entirely adequately.

Stray Highlights

The sets! My god we used to actually build things, not just greenscreens and rendering sweatshops. While it's filmed to the standards of its day — which is to say, the lighting isn't there; camera mobility isn't there; the colors have the uncanny technicolor reds & greens; it's trivial to tell which sound is from the boom mic and which is foley — it looks like such an interesting space to exist in and through that these alone feel worth the price of admission.

Maurice Binder (of James Bond fame) did the title cards/credit design. While these aren't nearly as stylized as his work on Bond films, they're still fun and novel in a Midcentury Animation type of way, of a kind with Saul Bass's posters or Maurice Noble's backgrounds.

Next Week

I'm watching the George Sidney directed adaptation of Kiss Me Kate from 1953. Thank you for reading My Year of Shakespeare. If you have any thoughts, responses, etc, please feel free to write me an email (my email address will show up on the banner if you are signed in).

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