MGM's Romeo and Juliet (1936)

PATRICIA KING HANSON: Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard are actually very good in their roles. Unfortunately, they were quite old for the roles. She was in her 30s, he was possibly close to 40 at the time. So they're way too old for the roles, but they're very good in the roles. And George Cukor is a very good director of that kind of subtle, romantic, emotional kind of a story, and so he was, I think, very good at that, too.

As you probably know, Norma Shearer was married to Irving Thalberg, who had been the head of production at MGM, and he was definitely the kind of production head who liked quality pictures and was always looking for quality pictures. He didn't feel that you had to have bad pictures or lowbrow pictures to be successful, so he, I think, was one of the production heads who would have been instrumental in these sort of, what we now would think, very highbrow pictures. And because he was always looking for vehicles to showcase his wife, Norma Shearer, who was not quite as popular with the audiences as some of the other MGM actresses—you know, Myrna Loy and Joan Crawford, and even Greta Garbo and so forth. So this was something he felt could showcase her talent. It certainly did, but unfortunately, again, she's a little bit too old for the part.

When people look at films from different ages, they have to take into account what else was going on in the world—what did people admire and like. And also, in the case of Hollywood films, which studio was producing it. You know, MGM was known as the sort of Tiffany of the studios, and "more stars than there are in the heavens," and they really didn't even have a B unit, per se. All of their films were quality pictures. So I think this was something they felt that the audience would love to have—the beautiful Adrian costumes, they loved the Cedric Gibbons art direction, and just things that spelled quality and really appealed to the audiences. And so they were making Shakespeare not so much the dramatist of the people, but sort of a higher artistic kind of a presentation that would kind of elevate their audience, and also appeal to the audience on a higher plane.