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Clip description
Romeo slays Tybalt in a street fight, but then is banished. Juliet (George Browne) laments at the news and seeks the Friar Lawrence’s help. The final tragedy unfolds as Juliet lies ‘dead’ only to be discovered by a distraught Romeo who kills himself in grief; the last scene shows Juliet melodramatically taking her own life.
Curator’s notes
The intertitles at the beginning of this Romeo and Juliet sequence indicate the Browne family staged this sequence in 1929. The intertitles warn ‘if you know the story, you’re OK. If you don’t, just try and sort it out for yourself’. The family enact the complete story in a seven-minute sequence consisting of around ten separate scenes, including the balcony scene. It was filmed in a number of backyard locations, but mainly at the Browne family home in Bray Street, Cremorne, a suburb on Sydney’s lower north shore.
In the scenes in Juliet’s garden in this clip, the perforations in between the 9.5 mm film frames can briefly be seen. 9.5 mm film has single perforations in the centre of each pair of frames, rather than perforations along one edge of the frame, allowing for more space for the picture.
The clip selected here tells the second half of the ill-fated Romeo and Juliet story with Juliet played by filmmaker George Browne in drag.
