Cinema: King Leer, Wild Kate

The Taming of the Shrew. "We intend to make Shakespeare as successful a screenwriter as Abby Mann." Thus spake Director Franco Zeffirelli last year when he began filming The Taming of the Shrew. The screen credits maintain the mock-the-bard tone: script billing goes to Zeffirelli, Paul Dehn and Suso Checchi D'Amico, with a coy acknowledgment "to William Shakespeare, without whom we would have been at a loss for words." The irreverence in this case is less a shame than a sham. Despite the disclaimer, Zeffirelli has succeeded in mounting the liveliest screen incarnation of Shakespeare since Olivier's Henry V.

A salty salvo in the war between the sexes, Shrew has already been through several screen treatments, including one with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sr., a long-running road-company revival with the Lunts, and a Broadway musical adaptation (Cole Porter's Kiss Me Kate). Zeffirelli has refurbished the oft-told tale by styling it with the brio of the 16th century commedia dell'arte. Moreover, his casting seems to be a case of art's imitating life: Elizabeth Taylor as the sharp-tongued tigress, Kate, and Richard Burton as her hard-nosed trainer, Petruchio.

For all its virtues, this particular taming is sometimes more shrewd than Shrew. The writers have edited Shakespeare's speeches, transposed lines, and improvised bits of business for the Burtons that never took place in the Globe's wooden O. Despite such wild tampering, most of the words and—more important —all of the spirit of the play have been maintained. To make sure that the viewer's eye never rests long enough to get restive, Zeffirelli builds the production against a background of burnt sienna, vermilion and viridian—the splashiest colors of the Renaissance palette. He also keeps Taylor and Burton front and center just long enough: their larger-than-life personalities dominate the screen without drowning the play.

In one of her better performances, Taylor makes Kate seem the ideal bawd of Avon—a creature of beauty with a voice shrieking howls and imprecations. Whenever Liz strains at the Elizabethan, the camera shifts to Burton, who catches the cadences of iambic pentameter with inborn ease. As the lickerish and liquorish Petruchio, Burton pursues his Kate with a weary, beery smile that promises temptation and trouble. An inspired chase across rooftops and into piles of fleece establishes him as a kind of King Leer, the supreme embodiment of a raffish comic hero.

Shakespeare cared too much for his satellite roles to give the entire show to the stars, and it is as much the supporting players as the Burtons who give the Shrew vitality. Victor Spinetti, Cyril Cusak and Michael Hordern are a brilliant bunch of second bananas. Natasha Pyne, as Kate's sister Bianca, plays with a wide-eyed vanilla-pudding approach that deliberately lends Kate more flavor.

This is not Zeffirelli's first brush with the bard. He once overdirected an eccentric Italian version of Hamlet in which the Dane intoned: "To be or not to be, what the hell!" In Shrew, he displays a sure sense of what makes comedy funny. When a classic is treated as deathless, it dies; by being brash and breezy, Zeffirelli has breathed new life into an old text.