Franco Zeffirelli's energetic handling of William Shakespeare's raucous battle of the sexes has been directed with the filmmaker's customary flair for pageantry, and yet the star duo, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, is disappointing. Blustery Petruchio, a 16th century fortune-hunter from Verona, is slated to woo Katharina, the wicked wench of Padua, whose hand is readily available; with her dowry looming large, Petruchio manages to get Katharina to the altar, where their stormy tussle of exchanges continues on to the honeymoon. Taylor and Burton would seem to be ideally suited to this material, but Burton's self-amused cackling begins to gnaw at one's nerves, while Taylor's mincing post-taming smiles aren't at all convincing (her best scene is her first one, leaning out the window). Whole sequences such as the wedding ceremony and the final gamble fail to take off, this mainly due to Zeffirelli's timing. The director does wonderful work with the small details but grand-scale storytelling seems to hinder him. A modest success at the box-office, the film set the stage for Zeffirelli's follow-up, 1968's "Romeo and Juliet", which finally made the Bard '60s accessible. **1/2 from ****
Review of The Taming of The Shrew
