West Side Story (1961)
Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins (1961)
The opening of the screen version of the legendary stage musical is assertively, proudly cinematic. The aerial shots of New York City are spectacular, even breathtaking. The camera swoops down from its God’s-eye survey of roads and buildings to a park where children play and some older boys are grouped by a wall. (This being the 1950s-going-on-60s, some of these kids, supposedly in their late teens, look twice that age.) The boys are the Jets, the white American street gang whose feud with the Puerto Rican Sharks drives the narrative of West Side Story. In this modern urban reworking of Romeo and Juliet, these ethnically-defined young ‘households’ are the inheritors of Montague and Capulet enmities. A white boy and a Puerto Rican girl are the star-crossed lovers at the tragic centre of the story.
The introduction to the gangs, although sharp cutting (by Thomas Stanford) makes it look like a movie, feels like a reversion to musical theatre. The dancers describe their characters in a repetitive, less quickly expressive way than screen actors normally do. After the unequivocally filmic start, the effect of this is a little disorienting and, eventually, a little tedious – even though the movement is far removed from dance conventions of the time: Jerome Robbins’s choreography for the original Broadway production of West Side Story in 1957 was famously innovative. Because Robert Wise had no experience of making musicals, the picture went into production with Robbins directing the song and dance parts. He left the project well before shooting was completed, in light of concerns that the production was running behind time and over budget. The excessive length of the Jets-Sharks intro makes you wonder if the Hollywood money men had a point.
The film switches into another gear as soon as the music moves from the ‘Jet Song’ into ‘Something’s Coming’ – a nicely apt title because, once the numbers start coming, there’s no stopping them: ‘Maria’, ‘Tonight’, ‘America’, ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’ – all before what was, on the film’s original release, the intermission point. Leonard Bernstein’s music and Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics are gloriously varied. West Side Story reached the screen in an era when it was conventional for the singing voices of non-singing stars to be dubbed (more on that below). Awareness of this, at least at this distance in time, helps the song score. The soaring, impassioned melodies of ‘Tonight’, ‘Maria’ and ‘Somewhere’ seem to operate independently of their sometimes corny dramatic context. The Wise-Robbins staging of numbers is repeatedly transcendent too – especially the ‘Tonight Quintet’ (where the cross-cutting reminds you that Robert Wise made his Hollywood name as a film editor) and the elating dancing of ‘America’, the Sharks battle-of-the-sexes ensemble. These moments, ‘America’ especially, make you want to applaud, as some of the NFT1 audience actually did.
The cast and performances are a mixed bag, with both leads, in different ways, problematic. Natalie Wood is ethnically plausible and her acting competent but she is, for the most part, emotionally shallow – an impression reinforced by the knowledge that Marni Nixon is doing Maria’s singing. That said, Wood makes Maria’s angry distress at the deaths of her brother Bernardo and her lover Tony, authentically –unexpectedly – powerful. Even allowing that Tony’s Jets days, until the climactic night of the story, are behind him, Richard Beymer looks wrong. It’s impossible to believe this clean-cut, toothpaste-smiled young man works as a drugstore delivery boy, let alone that he was ever in a street gang. He’s more like an anxious-to-please teacher who puts on jeans in an awkward attempt to be on his students’ wavelength – an attempt undermined by the crisp white shirt and sports jacket Tony wears in a couple of scenes. Beymer tries hard but the effort is somehow embarrassing. He’s every inch miscast; his extra height reinforces his incongruousness. Like Wood, he doesn’t actually sing (the voice belongs to Jimmy Bryant). This makes it all the more a mystery why the film-makers went for Beymer.
Each of the main characters corresponds to one in Romeo and Juliet. Anita, as Maria’s confidante, is technically the counterpart to Juliet’s nurse but that’s where the similarity between them ends. I hadn’t realised before how dramatically developed a character Anita is. Her trajectory in the story is expressed in two of the main numbers in which she’s involved. Anita leads the Puerto Rican girls’ cheerleading for their new home in ‘America’. Once her boyfriend Bernardo has died at Tony’s hand, she turns furiously on Maria in ‘A Boy Like That’:
‘A boy like that, who’ll kill your brother
Forget that boy, and find another
One of your own kind
Stick to your own kind …’
The trajectory is repeated, in a compressed way, when, in spite of Bernardo’s death, Anita agrees to help her friend Maria by hurrying to the drugstore to pass a message to Tony. When the Jets there assault Anita, she understandably changes her mind and tells a fateful lie. Rita Moreno takes full advantage of the role’s dramatic shaping and gives the film’s best performance. The quality of her acting and dancing is more satisfyingly balanced than anyone else’s, though Russ Tamblyn achieves a similar equilibrium in the more limited part of Riff, the Jets leader. Each of Moreno and Tamblyn sings at least one of their own numbers (respectively, ‘America’ and ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’, along with Riff’s contribution to the ‘Tonight Quintet’)[1].
As Bernardo, George Chakiris, who had played Riff in the first London stage production, does his own singing (in ‘America’ and the ‘Tonight Quintet’) and is a wonderful dancer. His silent smouldering just about passes muster but Chakiris is a somewhat wooden actor – though, interestingly, a better one whenever Bernardo’s on the move rather than standing still to deliver lines (whenever, in other words, George Chakiris is closer to dancing). Of the other gang kids, Tony Mordente (Action) is the strongest presence among the Jets. On the Sharks side, Jose De Vega does well enough in the thankless, eventually crucial role of Chino, Maria’s arranged fiancé. As the non-musical forces of law and order, Simon Oakland gives a good realistic performance as the plain clothes man Schrank; as the better known Krupke, a uniformed cop, William Bramley reprises his Broadway role.
Ernest Lehman’s screenplay, derived from Arthur Laurents’s book for the stage show, makes effective use of the Shakespeare plot to dramatise the clash of allegiances within the Jets and Sharks families. With gang violence and racism such powerfully persisting problems on both sides of the Atlantic, it’s not surprising that West Side Story falls into the (capacious) category of being as-relevant-as-ever – though the film’s awareness of its contemporary relevance is one of its clumsy features. There are times when the dialogue could be mistaken for that of a socially (self-)conscious Stanley Kramer picture of the period – most blatantly when the kindly drugstore owner Doc (overplayed by Ned Glass) says, ‘When do you kids stop? You make this world lousy’, and Action replies, ‘We didn’t make it, Doc’.
Thanks to its musical verve, clever lyrics and athletic choreography, ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’ rises above this – although the song’s assumption that street kids and cops would be au fait with socio-psychological explanations of juvenile delinquency doesn’t bear close inspection. In the event, though, the number’s exhilarating wit means that it functions almost as a satirical commentary on the Freudian-flavoured misunderstood teenager movies that were also in vogue at the time – an impression reinforced by Natalie Wood’s presence in the film, in the same year that she appeared in Splendor in the Grass.
I’d seen West Side Story a couple of times on television but never before in the cinema. This BFI screening, with a full house in their largest theatre, had a sense of occasion that managed to give some idea of how exciting an experience watching the film must have been at the time of its original release. As usual with the big musicals of the era, an overture precedes each half of the picture, increasing the audience’s feelings of anticipation. What follows is far from perfect but the defects don’t overshadow the delights. ‘The minutes seem like hours/The hours go so slowly …,’ sings Maria in the ‘Tonight Quintet’. In fact, West Side Story is so variously absorbing and entertaining that its two hours and thirty-two minutes fly by.
14 December 2019
[1] Betty Wand supplies Anita’s voice for the low register of ‘A Boy Like That’ and Marni Nixon for the ‘Tonight Quintet’ (where, in other words, Nixon is the voice of both Anita and Maria). Tucker Smith, who plays Ice, one of the other Jets, dubbed Riff’s voice on ‘Jet Song’.