for a radio broadcast as they entered and simply announced each one as he or she arrived. Reception According to MGM records, the film earned $2,075,000 worldwide but because of its high production cost lost $922,000. Some critics liked the film, but on the whole, neither critics nor the public responded enthusiastically. Graham Greene wrote that he was "less than ever convinced that there is an aesthetic justification for filming Shakespeare at all... the effect of even the best scenes is to distract." "Ornate but not garish, extravagant but in perfect taste, expansive but never overwhelming, the picture reflects great credit upon its producers and upon the screen as a whole", wrote Frank Nugent in a rave review for The New York Times. "It is a dignified, sensitive and entirely admirable Shakespearean—not Hollywoodean—production." Variety called the film a "faithful" adaptation with "very beautiful" costuming, but also found it "not too imaginative" and "a long sit" at over two hours. Film Daily raved that it was a "superb and important achievement" and "one of the most important contributions to the screen since the inception of talking pictures." John Mosher of The New Yorker called it "a very definite achievement" but "somewhat cumbersome", writing "This is a good, sensible presentation of 'Romeo and Juliet,' but it won't be one you'll hark back to when you are discussing the movies as great art, if you do ever discuss them as great art." Many moviegoers considered the film too "arty", staying away as they had from Warner's A Midsummer Night's Dream a year before and leading Hollywood to abandon the Bard for over a decade. The film nevertheless received four Oscar nominations and for many years was considered one of the great MGM classics. In his annual Movie and Video Guide, Leonard Maltin gives both this film version and the popular 1968 Franco Zeffirelli version (with Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting) an equal rating of three-and-a-half stars. More recently, scholar Stephen Orgel describes Cukor's film as "largely miscast ... with a preposterously mature pair of lovers in Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer, and an elderly John Barrymore as a stagey Mercutio decades out of date." Barrymore was in his fifties, and played Mercutio as a flirtatious tease. Orgel adds that Tybalt, often portrayed as a hot-headed troublemaker, is played by Basil Rathbone as stuffy and pompous. Patricia Tatspaugh observes that subsequent film versions made