Monthly Archives: December 2019

  • West Side Story (1961)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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’.

  • The Woman in the Window

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Fritz Lang (1944)

    SPOILER WARNING:  There’s already one of these on the home page, explaining that I don’t normally put warnings on individual reviews.  In this particular case, doing so seems only fair.  …

    In The Woman in the Window’s opening scene, Richard Wanley (Edward G Robinson), assistant professor of psychology at New York’s Gotham College, is delivering a lecture to his students on the varieties of homicide.  ‘The man who kills in self-defence …,’ declares Wanley, ‘must not be judged by the same standards applied to the man who kills for gain’.  Later that day, after seeing his wife (Dorothy Peterson) and children off on vacation, Wanley goes for dinner at his club with two friends and contemporaries, Frank Lalor (Raymond Massey), a district attorney, and Michael Barkstane (Edmund Breon), a medical doctor.  As they talk afterwards, Wanley humorously laments his middle age and declining appetite for risk-taking.  On their way into the club, all three men had been struck by a portrait of a beautiful young woman in the window of a neighbouring shop.  ‘Even if the spirit of adventure should rise up before me and beckon,’ Wanley now tells the others, ‘even in the form of that alluring young woman in the window next door, I’m afraid that all I’ll do is clutch my coat a little tighter, mutter something idiotic and run like the devil’.

    When his friends have taken their leave, Wanley sits down with a book in the club’s reading room.  He asks Collins (Frank Dawson), the steward, to remind him when it’s 10.30 pm and Collins obliges.  Wanley leaves the club and, as he does so, looks again at the portrait in the window.  To his amazement, a young woman (Joan Bennett), a dead ringer for the subject of the painting, appears in the glass of the window, then in the street beside him.  Introducing herself as Alice Reed, she confirms that she did indeed sit for the portrait.  Within a couple of screen minutes, Wanley has accepted an invitation to go back to Alice’s apartment for a drink.  Their friendly conversation there is interrupted by the arrival of another man (Arthur Loft) who angrily sets about Wanley.  The professor grabs a pair of scissors and, in self-defence, stabs and kills the man.

    With Alice’s help, Wanley then gets to work disposing of the corpse.  The dead man was known to Alice, his mistress, as Frank Howard but his real name is Claude Mazard and he was a crooked financier.  Frank Lalor is involved in the investigation of the crime, alongside the local police chief Jackson (Thomas E Jackson).  After asking Wanley for a psychological insight into the mind of the killer, Lalor takes his nervous friend along to the site where Mazard’s body has been found.  Alice, meanwhile, is blackmailed by Mazard’s former bodyguard Heidt (Dan Duryea), who saw her entering the apartment building with Wanley, but the ex-bodyguard is Jackson’s and Lalor’s prime suspect.  After Alice has failed to silence him with an overdose of the sleeping tablets Dr Barkstane has prescribed for the understandably insomniac Wanley, Heidt is killed in a shootout with the police.  Too late, it seems, to save Wanley, though.  When Alice tries to call him with the news about Heidt, there’s no reply.  Wanley has taken the rest of the sleeping tablets and is slumped in his chair – apparently dead, until a man’s voice wakes him from his doze, telling him it’s 10.30 pm.

    It-was-only-a-dream stories usually feel like a copout.  This one, written by Nunnally Johnson (who adapted a novel called Once Off Guard by J H Wallis), is an exception.  The twist in the tale is satisfying for several reasons.  Perhaps most important, Edward G Robinson, relaxed and funny in the early scenes, is so convincingly distraught by the chance event that suddenly and completely ruins Richard Wanley’s life that you can hardly believe he doesn’t go straight to the police, rather than try to conceal the crime.  (The weight of guilt continues to press heavily on Robinson, though he never loses his wit.)  Besides, it feels so unjust that this should have happened to the decent Wanley, who’s far from a self-satisfied, safe-in-his-ivory-tower kind of academic.   It’s only right, in other words, that it didn’t happen.

    The book Wanley takes from the club’s library shelves before his doze is a copy of that unique Old Testament document, the Song of Songs – unique because it’s a celebration of erotic love, with poetry well equipped to conjure up the femme fatale that is Alice Reed.  Wanley dreams himself a coherent film noir (shot and lit by Milton R Krasner) but it’s one that includes a few seeming improbabilities.  Why does Howard/Mazard arrive outside Alice’s place wearing a straw boater when it’s pouring with rain?  He’s a big man:  how does Edward G Robinson, who isn’t, manage to get the corpse into a car single-handed?  It’s pleasing to be niggled by these things as unrealistic only to finally accept them as elements of a dream.  The roles played in it by Lalor (Raymond Massey is easier and more humorous than usual) and Barkstane are similarly convincing.

    Fritz Lang’s direction is perfectly judged.  He gives Wanley’s nightmare the emotional weight it merits but stops short of melodrama.  In the comical epilogue, he shows a light touch that doesn’t curdle into tongue-in-cheek smugness.  On his way out of the club, Wanley collects his hat from the cloakroom attendant – Mazard’s doppelgänger.  On the steps, the doorman, who’s the spitting image of Heidt, bids Wanley a friendly goodnight.   In the street, Wanley pauses briefly by the portrait in the window and a woman passer-by (Iris Adrian) asks him for a light.   The professor, as he predicted earlier in the evening, clutches his coat a little tighter, mutters something idiotic (‘Oh, no – thank you – not for a million dollars!’) and heads off hurriedly down the street.

    13 December 2019

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