A Perfect Melding of Dance, Song, and Celluloid
I never thought West Side Story was my kind of movie musical. My favorites of the genre are Singin' in the Rain and the 2005 version of The Producers (though the latter is admittedly sometimes more of a filmed musical rather than a musical film). These are funny pictures filled with catchy songs. West Side Story was always one of those "Great Movies" I never quite understood. An urban ballet that retells Romeo and Juliet? Eh. That doesn't sound as fun as "Springtime for Hitler."
The problem, of course, was that I hadn't seen it. When an opportunity arose to view the film with an audience of a couple thousand people, I jumped at it. I walked with cautious optimism into what seemed like the perfect way to see the film, and it exceeded my expectations tenfold.
West Side Story, as directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, captures a New York of the late 1950s and early 1960s caught between one era's idealism and another's cynicism. Before the Upper West Side became home to Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer, it was disputed turf between the Jets and the Sharks. The former is a caucasian street gang, the latter Puerto Rican. Tony (Richard Beymer) and Maria (Natalie Wood) are the star-crossed lovers caught in the middle.
The plot is simple and works best as a framework on which to hang the phenomenal score by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, as well as the kinetic choreography by Robbins. Wise (who edited Citizen Kane and later directed The Sound of Music) and Robbins (who choreographed and directed West Side Story on Broadway) strike the perfect balance of cinematic and theatrical staging.
When we first meet the Jets in the film's opening scene, they not only dance around local basketball courts, they spill out onto the street. Rather than plant the camera in one spot and watch the scene unfold, the frame moves with the fluid motions of the actors. I'm not a huge fan of extended dance sequences in films, because while the dancers may be exquisite, a stationary camera can suck the cinematic air out of the scene and make me wonder why I didn't just see the same thing in a live theatrical performance. But in West Side Story, when the actors move, the camera always seems to move with them, lending energy not just to their performances, but to the film as a whole.
Conversely, some of the film's strongest emotional beats are found through song rather than dance. Though Bernstein's score pulsates behind the strictly dance sequences, his and Sondheim's songs captivate and move the story along to such a degree that intricate dance is unnecessary. Tony's excitement in "Something's Coming" is palpable in the song and the actor's performance, just as his and Maria's exhilarating new romance seems as thrilling as any dance in the film because of what the actors do with their faces and voices (though Beymer and Wood's singing is dubbed, it's expertly synced).
The cast of West Side Story is filled with many veterans of both stage and screen. Natalie Wood's Maria is appropriately naive and sweet, as is Richard Beymer's Tony. Neither performer is as electrifying as Rita Moreno, who steals the show with her Academy Award-winning portrayal of Maria's sister-in-law Anita, but Wood and Beymer remain an effective, innocent couple at the center of a larger conflict. The casting choice of the white Wood as the Puerto Rican Maria is more questionable today than it was in 1961, but her performance luckily never tips into the area of stereotypical caricature (she's most certainly not Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's). George Charkiris, another Oscar winner as Sharks leader Bernardo, and Russ Tamblyn, as Jets chief Riff, are both captivating in their own respective ways in standout roles.
I can only assume tough-as-nails New York street gangs never actually had ballet-infused rumbles and sang about their mutual hate with a jazzy score backing them up, but West Side Story nonetheless captures a moment in time. Stephen Sondheim has said that West Side Story isn't really about prejudice, it's about theater. Specifically the new ideas it brought to the Broadway musical stage. Landing squarely between the last gasp of the great MGM musicals of the 1950s and the epic musicals of the early and mid-1960s (like My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music), West Side Story is also emblematic of a new, different kind of movie musical. One that's bigger and more daring.
More than fifty years after its initial release, West Side Story's characters, conflicts and music still resonate, and as piece of cinema, it's lost none of what makes it a classic.