Product: Romeo and Juliet [Region 2] (1968)
Rating: 5.0
I threw my younger years on a pile of burning desires
I first experienced this movie when it opened in the theaters while in my late-teens. I was in love with Love. I have never been the same. While Errol Flynn as Robin Hood inspires me to swashbuckling glory, and the two 'unknowns' in Elvira Madigan bring tears to my eyes, when Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting as star-crossed lovers dance to the nightingale's etherereal notes like entranced butterflies around a flame, I lose touch with the humdrum and my hollow heart finds brief refuge in their tender embrace. Now in my late-50s, as I wade through memories like a walker shuffling kneedeep through dead leaves, I realize how often I have heard the lark and how rarely the nightingale. I visited this site having rewoken that dream, like an ember briefly rekindled, by attending an opera of the same name two nights past; witnessing a stout Romeo woo a semblance of Juliet, I am haunted by the faint song of their nightingale and . . . 'never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo' . . . I am still in love with Love and this version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is an exquisitely pure distillation of Love as I searched for it then in my youth - it has left for me the trace of a romantically tragic dewdrop on Memory's windowpane . . . through which, with eyes closed and heart open, I can almost perceive through the haze of time Olivia/Juliet's beautiful countenance and clear eyes