Well... where do I start? Saying that this version of Shakespeare's classic is "too Hollywood" is insulting Hollywood. In fact, when I come to think what director in film history blew more literary classics, the name of George Cukor immediately comes to mind. Not that he was a bad director, he made very good movies such as The Philadelphia Story, but any time he touched a classic book, the result bit the big one.<br /><br />We can blame David O'Selznick for the inclusion of 34-year-old Norma Shearer as Shakespeare's 13-year-old Juliet (and so, Leslie Howard as an equally olde Romeo), but we have to blame Mr. Cukor for having her act with a level of vomitive cuteness not reached even in the worst high school productions of the play. Come on, what's it with the introductory Bambi scene? Not even Disney would have done this to the Bard! This kind of cutesy-cute camp seems to be a Cukor trademark: any time I think of Elizabeth Allan as Clara Copperfield waving to Freddie Bartholomew as he leaves in Barkis' cart in the year before's "David Copperfield", I feel sick! Another of Georgie's trademarks I can't stomach is the inevitable adding of corny, unfunny comic reliefs. In this case, Edna May Oliver as the Nurse, and specially Andy Devine, turning Peter into a retard (as was Mr. Dick in the mentioned "Copperfield"). That's not the kind of witty humor that was present in some moments of the Bard's tragedy!<br /><br />And speaking of that, and let me apologize if someone finds this homophobic, nothing further to my intention, but Cukor has a tendence to recreate sissy characters. I know he was gay, but that doesn't mean that he's authorized to turn what's maybe the play's most interesting supporting character, Mercutio, into RuPaul! John Barrymore's acting is terrible in this one. In fact, there's only an example of good acting here, and that's the always solid Basil Rathbone as Tybalt. Leslie Howard was a good actor, but all wrong for the part, and all the others rank from unmemorable to awful. And the sissiness goes on: all the film looks like a Wigstock celebration, with wicked gay touches, as making Rosaline (the girl Romeo raves about before meeting Juliet) an extremately plain-looking woman with not much attractive. This gay approach makes the film more of a travesty, independently from the theory about the Bard's homosexuality.<br /><br />However, people seems to like the film because it respects the text of the play almost verbatim. But I wouldn't care if they changed or cut things out, if they respected the spirit of the classic: it's about teen angst, people. Read the book. You can have the full text, but I think the subtext is even more important. And there's no subtext in this version, at least not the one Shakespeare intended.<br /><br />My question is: has this play ever been accurately adapted to the big or small screen? It's much more than a pompous love story...