2 hrs & 31 min, color,
1961
Here is a trivia question
for all you movie goers and fans: Who is the only director ever fired from a
film in the middle of production who went on nevertheless to win an Oscar for
that very direction?
The answer: Jerome Robbins, co-director with Robert Wise on the movie version of “West Side Story”. He was fired for becoming over the months of production extremely difficult to work with. Robbins, as many of you know, was responsible for designing the choreography on the musical, not only for the movie, but for the original stage production. In a very real sense it is his show. And because the work of the choreographer was so essential to the staging, he was given the title credit of Director. Practically everybody in the huge cast did both singing and dancing during the running time, and Wise was not a dance director. He could never have brought the picture off without Robbins’ genius. It is a picture of extensive body movement, not just in the dancing but in the walking and running and fast-stepping of the players in the fine points of their performances. I suppose Wise oversaw the dramatic close-ups, but it was Robbins who gave the brilliant film its pace and its beat.
It was an unprecedented screen work upon first release in 1961. Leonard Bernstein’s score and Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics were unusually demanding on the cast and crew. It made a sound that had never been made on the Hollywood screen before, and dancing had never been used on screen before as we see it. The Rock era was only five years along, and movie audiences had not yet grown accustomed to the strange new offbeat/backbeat/street beat, jagged footloose-ness and finger snapping of the words and melodies. Without a doubt Robbins was an essential in the movie’s creation.
But what tripped him up was
his perfectionism. He was never
satisfied, changing his mind over and over about the setup of a choreographed
scene. On the stage he was working from
scratch and had much more authority and flexibility; there was much more room
for experimentation. But making a movie
is vastly different from mastering a stage.
The result of his obstinacy was tightened control by United Artists. Not only was he threatening to lengthen the
shooting time exponentially and put the producers in jeopardy of having players
leaving the film to fulfill previously made commitments elsewhere, but money
was also a strong consideration. He was
costing them a lot of it at a time when
movies were generally in a slump and studios were tight with a buck. Those of you under fifty years of age in all
likelihood are not aware of that.
In some ways the stage is a
stronger medium than the screen, but in other respects, quite visible and
dominant here, the screen has greater possibilities. The movie’s opening is quite a bender of
expectation. Well before there is any
personal confrontation we get a sweeping overview of New York from the lower
Battery up to a west side playground by way of an aerial air born camera pointed
straight down and panning steadily in a
leftward direction, with finger snapping music slowly coming upon the
audience’s ear. It is like being told
that “Somewhere in the big city a heart beats – maybe many hearts. Dreams and soiled ambitions are perking in a
pot. So let’s go find and visit
them.” Then it ends with a fast zoom
shot down onto the playground.
Actually the movie got made
just in time. Once shooting stopped,
that entire section of the city was bulldozed to make room for Lincoln Center,
upon which construction started immediately afterward. That means that there is nowhere anyone can
visit today in which the settings can be found.
I do not know whether it was planned that way or not, but if the city
designers and the studio had not mutually cooperated, the results film-wise
might have been disastrous.
Now here is another trivia
question: What famous movie critic thought “West Side Story” was corny and
crude and predicted that the music would be passe and forgotten in not more
than a decade. The answer: Pauline Kael,
famed critic for the New Republic magazine in her early years and for The New
Yorker in her later life, not to mention her many books about movies and
various special articles she wrote. I
will not go into her life; I simply mention that she made many enemies among
her fellow critics and wrapped herself in a mantle of controversy that grew
more and more thick the older she got before her death from Parkinson’s disease
in 2001 at age 82, many years after her retirement. She did have a shrewd way with words and
could be very entertaining for readers with her humor. She had admirers but not a lot of close
friends in show business.
It is needless to point it
out but I will anyway: Kael could not have been more wrong in her
prediction. It is almost universally
agreed that “West Side Story” is Bernstein’s greatest musical achievement, and
considering all he composed over his long and productive life and career, that
is saying a bunch. His melodies from
that scenario are heard quite frequently, on radio, TV and just about every
medium you can think of. The play has
been produced dozens of times in various venues and continues to emerge within
the clear hearing of the public. And
what is remarkable is that despite all the unconventional material the show contains,
there are easy to follow melodies that cozy up to us with such sweet effect,
ones that are not sentimental but that are heartfelt and passionate and have
soul and radiance. Every musical number is
without doubt a showstopper, an event – a bridge crossed to move the plot
along, not a detour or a mere dalliance.
Everything that happens musically contributes something essential.
At the core of it we have
the soul and spirit of Shakespeare. The
story is basically “Romeo and Juliet”, the bard’s timeless tale about young
lovers trying to penetrate walls of social division and hate to make a chosen
life for themselves in the face of impending tragedy, only instead of the
streets of Verona, Italy during the Renaissance we have the mean streets of New
York City in the middle of the 20th century. Instead of two prominent well established
feuding families acting out of bitter, age old rivalry we have delinquent street
gangs baiting each other into open warfare to get control of neighborhood
territory. One is the native Jets and
the other Puerto Rican immigrant kids who call themselves the Sharks. Every segment of the plot comes right out of
the centuries-old play starting, as the play does, in a public place in which
the antagonists annoy, insult, punch, provoke, trip, chase and finally clash
with each other. Only while Shakespeare
employs mostly words, Bernstein uses nothing but soundtrack music. The seemingly runaway score proves, for those
willing to get into it, not runaway at all.
It has design and organized energy and leads somewhere decisive. It is, aside from being ingeniously composed,
very forceful and confrontational.
I know I am not giving
anything away to say that the story revolves around a native teen boy named Tony
(derived from Anton) weary of his delinquent past, and Maria, a sheltered
Puerto Rican girl just recently arrived in the States from the Caribbean. They
are the tragic, star-crossed lovers caught between the rival gangs. Natalie Wood scores high as Maria and Richard Beymer does an earnest job of making
Tony stand tall and strong, even though his sweet baby face at times gets in
the way of what should be a tough demeanor.
Their scenes together draw out the very best in each, until the
climactic sequence when death parts them.
Wood dominates the entire closing sequence; it is one of her finest
screen moments. We watch her turn from a
dreamy kid into a hateful antagonist herself, from fantasy to crushing
reality.
Then a film that has thrived
on fast movement and colliding fury fades gently out in grief and silent
mortification. All that is left are
distant echoes and melodic recaps over closing credits. Tre-men-dous!
But there is another player
in this tragedy who deserves the highest marks of all. Her name is Rita Moreno; she fills the part of Maria’s friend Anita, the lover of her older brother Ricardo (George
Chakiris), leader of the Sharks, and when I say fills it, I mean she makes every second of it her own. She is totally electrifying in every
respect. Hers may be a supporting role,
but I cannot imagine the film without her. She is a very active and aggressive force,
oozing sensuality out of every pore, a feisty foil for male high-mindedness all
about her. She strikes chords that ring
the rafters in every direction. She is
quite a dancer too; she and Chakiris in the “America” number on the rooftop do
some configuring that still astounds me after all these decades. They are in every regard over the top. (Moreno can currently be seen as the mother
in the TV series “One Day at a Time” recently reviewed on this blog.)
And a word needs to be said
for Russ Tamblyn, who plays Riff, the acting leader of the Jets. He is sharp and right on cue in every scene
in which he appears; he too is quite an accomplished hoofer. It was a pleasure to watch him, both in the
choreography and in the dramatic moments.
Anita and Ricardo try to
take Maria and her roving eye in tow, but she slips out of their control and
falls hook, line and sinker for Tony, and that is when the big trouble
begins. That is when the tribal
solidarity throws up a roadblock to love and understanding. That is when the latent savagery comes to the
surface.
“West Side Story” will live
on and on. It is the saga of displaced
youth struggling for survival in a world others have created, youth forlorn,
uprooted and misdirected. It is the kind
of thing that deserves front page attention in any age, including ours, wherein
such deathly dangers threaten to snuff out otherwise beautiful lives.
To read other entries in my
blog, please consult its website:
enspiritus.blogspot.com. To know
about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.