There are seven versions of Romeo and Juliet generally available. I have seen the ones listed here: there are others, but they are a good deal harder to track down.

1936, George Cukor: The most immediately striking fact about the 1936 George Cukor version is that Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer are both considerably too old for their parts. Leslie Howard was 43 in 1936, and Norma Shearer was 34: while this might have played convincingly on stage, the camera is too exacting to allow this kind of age-shifting. A middle-aged pair of teen lovers doesn't quite work, and rather misses the point of the play. The formidable John Barrymore (age 54) plays Mercutio, and Basil Rathbone (age 44) plays Tybalt: they are also too old for their roles. While hardly a geriatric production of the play, part of its youthful zest is lost.

That (considerable) point aside, however, the performances are still remarkably good, and very subtly nuanced. The direction is clean; the plot outline never becomes murky. Leslie Howard's diction is clear and his emotional tone never descends into the sniveling angst one so often sees in Romeos of later ages; Shearer delivers a lot of emotional punch without descending into the howling maudlin that sometimes affects productions of this play. There's a seriousness about the delivery that seems neither as affected as the Zeffirelli nor as ironic and self-aware as the Campbell production. There are moments of humor, though they are not emphasized greatly.

The art direction is lavish, and occasionally reminiscent of the musical theater of the 1930s, complete with Busby Berkeley numbers for its dances (though with more decorous music), but never really excessive. The score is a patchwork of Italian Renaissance tunes (transformed much as in Respighi's "Ancient Airs and Dances") and Tschaikovsky's venerable Romeo and Juliet ballet score. The fusion is a little difficult if you are used to these pieces on thier own terms, but the synthesis is not bad overall. All in all, a worthwhile and watchable treatment of the play.

1954, Renato Castellani: This almost unknown production has some real virtues. It has relatively few "name" actors, other than the legendary John Gielgud as the Chorus (a role he takes up again in the BBC Shakepeare version twenty-four years later), whose role is really outside the drama, and Sebastian Cabot as Capulet. The rest of the roles are adequately filled, however, and allow the story to shine through with relatively little interpretive spin.

1968, Franco Zeffirelli: While not without certain flaws, and saddled with an unreflective, almost gooey sentimentality that weakens the play in the long run, I would say that this is one of the more watchable version of Romeo and Juliet, and reasonably faithful to the artistic intentions behind the original composition. When it was first released it was quite a celebrated production, and had many teenage admirers (mostly girls) swooning over it -- for mostly the wrong reasons. It features a 16-year-old Olivia Hussey in the role that made her famous, and her performance has seldom been surpassed for simple innocent charm, even though she doesn't seem to be the brightest Juliet ever to appear on film. On the other hand, John McEnery's weirdly manic Mercutio and Michael York's intense Tybalt are worth seeing all on their own. Leonard Whiting's Romeo is, frankly, eminently forgettable.

The real star of the show is the setting: Zeffirelli was attempting to reawaken the play in its native Italy (an Italy that Shakespeare himself never saw, of course), and he goes for a not-quite-naturalistic scrubbed past evocative of the costume dramas of the 1950s -- a world without running water or dentists in which people still remained unaccountably clean and have marvelously straight white teeth (as opposed to the world of The Return of Martin Guerre or the like). Still, it offers the play in something approaching period costumes on the streets of a more or less credible Renaissance Verona. The photography is solid. The score offers some moderately cloying music that was wildly popular in its time, and now evokes nothing so much as the late 1960s. Still, one can ignore that.

1978, Alvin Rakoff: This play (part of the BBC Shakespeare Plays) is now available to the public, and can be found in the "Tragedy" five-play set from Ambrose Video. Its cast is extremely solid, and in addition to the leads, Patrick Ryecart (Romeo) and Rebecca Saire (Juliet), neither of them particularly prominent, it includes Michael Hordern (Capulet), John Gielgud (Chorus), Anthony Andrews (Mercutio), and Alan Rickman (Tybalt).

The acting is almost uniformly excellent. Ryecart's Romeo is less spineless than most others, and more appealing on that account, perhaps, though he brings an occasional severity to the role that some may find unsympathetic. Rebecca Saire (age 15) is somewhat less experienced, but certainly adequate in diction, and she brings a genuine freshness to the part. Anthony Andrews' Mercutio is a genuine stand-out, bringing his rather unsettling manic delivery to the great set-pieces including the Queen Mab speech. Michael Hordern's initially comic Capulet is more finely tuned than might appear on first viewing, and in its turn achieves some real emotional depth; Rickman brings his syrupy black voice to a wonderfully malevolent Tybalt. The role of the Nurse, one of the great parts for an older actress, is carried with great aplomb by Celia Johnson, a long-time veteran of the English stage who made only a few film appearances.

As with most of the BBC Shakespeare series, the production values are modest when contrasted with the Zeffirelli version that preceded it, but the sets are less stagey and the art direction less Spartan than many of the others of the series. It is as faithful a production as one is likely to see.

1993, Norman Campbell: A Canadian production of Romeo and Juliet starring Megan Follows (of "Green Gables" fame) is set in a period loosely evocative of 1900-1920. Why? No particular reason I can discern. It has a certain loosely universal sense about it. That aside, the presentation is fairly straightforward, the acting generally quite good, and the pacing sensible. Follows is quite extraordinary, and very engaging, and almost makes Juliet's nearly-undocumented falling-in-love credible; Cimolino's Romeo seems to me a bit of whiner and a wimp, and to the end one wonders whether he feels sorry for anyone but himself. In any case, it's a film of a stage production on a small thrust stage -- more like Shakespeare's own theater than one is likely to find most other places. The video is complete with views of the audience, and their reactions become a part of the vicarious theatrical experience.

The most noteworthy strategic decision in the production is its ongoing emphasis on the comedic element in the play. This certainly seems counter-intuitive: after all, the play is supposed to be a tragedy. But part of Shakespeare's genius is in realizing that tragedy need not grow in purely tragic soil: the mixture of opposites is a more effective mixture. And if one reads carefully, one will see that there is a lot of comedy along the way in Romeo and Juliet. I would argue that much of what makes the leading characters appealing is built up not from a throroughgoing sense of their foredoomed love, but through sympathy, and comedy is one of the best paths to sympathy.

There are two principal veins of comedy to be mined here: first, Shakespeare produced in this play two of his finest and richest comedic characters -- Mercutio and the Nurse; second, the situational comedy, which can verge on slapstick -- of the two young lovers, can be either ignored or flaunted. This production makes it pivotal. In the long run, this tends to whet the tragic edge more effectively than all the moping actors in the world, much as the early scenes of whimsy sharpen the end of Puccini's La Boheme. That Shakespeare appreciated this tricky balance of laughter and grief is shown by the fact that his other version of the play, "Pyramus and Thisbe", which appears as a play-within-a-play in A Midsummer Night's Dream, is in fact played almost entirely for laughs (at least in all productions but one that I have seen).

One concomitant, however, needs to be mentioned in this context: much of the comic development (especially in respect to Mercutio), tends toward the suggestive and bawdy. Those with a low tolerance for this kind of thing will probably find several scenes a bit uncomfortable. There is nothing exceedingly graphic about it, however.

1994, Alan Horrox: This is one of the most visually remarkable productions I have seen. It's far less glowingly beautiful than the Zeffirelli production, but at the same time it's arresting and convincing to watch. At the same time it reduces Shakespeare's play by such severe cutting that only the bare love story remains, surrounded by circumstantial tatters that are hard to piece together. The whole runs to 81 minutes -- not half as long as some other productions. Whole scenes are discarded, and others are reduced to the bare minimum.

The result is something that is hard to gauge or to measure alongside other productions. None of the performances is really outstanding; none of them is really appallingly bad, either. Romeo is credible, Juliet slightly less so (I think); the supporting cast is adequate all round. Mercutio is wildly manic and even threatening, but he lacks McEnery's and Barrymore's comic notes, and hence is far less sympathetic. My sense for the drama is that Mercutio's death shouldn't come as a relief -- and here it does.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the production as a whole is its art direction, which recalls Vermeer more than anything else. Lighting is not uniformly bright, as it is in Zeffirelli, or uniformly dim, as it is in some of the BBC productions: by day, the sun may shine brightly outside, but light enters rooms through the windows, and creates visually striking shadows on walls and across the omnipresent checkered floor. By night, there is only candlelight. The sets look as though they are taken from a sequence of Renaissance still-life paintings, and the colors are balanced with a painterly regard for the screen as a canvas. Costumes are not extravagant or gorgeous, but simple and attractive. The experience is somewhat peculiar, in that the setting for the story seems to have been put together with more care and subtlety than what is left of the play, when all is said and done.

All in all, worth seeing, but a kind of Shakespeare Lite when it comes to presenting the actual words of the poet.

1997, Baz Luhrman: To my taste, the uncontested claimant to the title of worst cinematic Shakespeare of the decade -- perhaps of all time -- is the Baz Luhrman production entitled Romeo + Juliet. It's set in a kind of Miami Vice universe, and it expends virtually all its dramatic and emotional capital merely trying to achieve the transposition. Nothing remains for the story. We are invited to admire the cleverness of the director in leaping the artificial hurdles he has set up for himself, but in the process we are never drawn into the story. I confess to looking on this kind of enterprise with a large amount of skepticism from the outset, but I will also admit that not every modernistic production is necessarily a train-wreck. The recent Ethan Hawke Hamlet is an interestingly contrary case: while it certainly has problems, it uses its relocation in time and space to some advantage, and seems to maintain a respect for the overall goals of the play. On the whole, it works.

Romeo + Juliet does not. The graffitistic sensibility of the title more or less sums up the aesthetic of the whole, which resembles nothing so much as a crude joke scrawled by an illiterate on a bathroom wall. Taking a variably talented cast ranging from the good (Clare Danes as Juliet and Pete Postlethwaite as Friar Lawrence, for example) to the unspeakably bad (Leonardo DiCaprio would be well advised never to attempt Shakespeare again -- certainly not until he learns enough English to figure out what the phrases mean), Luhrman seems to have set out on a course of mere artistic demolition for its own sake. The language has been abused, the emotional core has been wrenched from its moorings, and any good-faith effort to elicit even a kernel of what Shakespeare was driving at has been eclipsed by arch inversions and pointless distractions -- handguns named "Sword", the biker friar, casual and extensive drug abuse, a transvestite Mercutio, and more or less random sexual activity sprinkled wherever the director can't think of something else to do. One imagines that this was not accidental, but that it represents an attempt to do a post-modern inversion of the play -- but I am hard-pressed to say what interest it serves, other than a kind of anarchic literary vandalism. Whether you like it or not, it has virtually nothing to do with the play that Shakespeare wrote.

If you want to see Romeo and Juliet with gangs, watch Westside Story. It has a better concept, better acting, and some catchy tunes.

Related:

1966, Paul Czinner: There are several ballet versions of Romeo and Juliet; this features Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev in the title roles of Prokofiev's version. Unsurprisingly, given the medium, Shakespeare's remarkable dialogue has pretty well disappeared.

Westside Story is not strictly Romeo and Juliet, but it is the same underlying story. The two families are replaced by poor whites and Puerto Ricans in New York, and the result is a fairly credible, gritty musical, with songs and dance numbers that captured a generation.

In addition, the winner for Best Picture of 1998 Academy Awards, Shakespeare in Love, is improbably centered about the writing and first production of Romeo and Juliet. It's definitely not a film for all ages, as it involves a certain amount of relatively frank sex; the writing, however, bears the unmistakable stamp of Tom Stoppard, whose droll ways of playing with Shakespeare brought us Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. The acting is exuberant and delightful. I didn't think it was Best Picture material, really -- especially in the year that also offered Life is Beautiful, but it is a virtuoso piece on its own terms, loaded with knowing Shakespearean jokes and preposterous explanations for how all sorts of things came about. In general, one must scrupulously avoid taking Shakespeare in Love as anything even approaching the historically valid; at the same time, however, it presents one of the best realizations ever of the physical context of the Elizabethan theater -- what it would have felt to move around inside it, and to watch a play there.