17/31: West Side Story
Hurr. Furthermore, durr.
I don’t like musicals. I realize it’s ridiculous to complain that they come off stagey, but they do, and I don’t care for it.
But I do like the songs from musicals a lot of times (see: the conversation in which Wing, scrolling through my iPod, observed dryly that it was pretty ironic that someone had Oklahoma!-bombed me of all people), and I like almost every song in West Side Story. Compulsively hummable earwigs, enough clever rhyming to make up for the venue-inappropriate dearth of cursing — it’s a good soundtrack.
But the story is kind of obnoxious, in a way that’s impervious to updates. I went to see the revival a couple of years ago that tried to have the Puerto Rican characters actually read as Puerto Rican: accent coaching, a few songs rewritten in Spanish, and so on. The idea made total sense on paper, but felt clumsy and under-worked onstage and did nothing to address the much larger problem, that these alleged gang members wear khakis and Chucks and say “golly gee” a lot. I understand that “Krup you” caused le scandale back in the day…but you’ve got “Krup you,” and then you’ve got these ground-up shots that make it clear the Jets ain’t wearing jockstraps, if you know what I mean. And I mean peen. Lots of it. What up, 1961?
With all of that said, my ingrained dislike of the format, the datedness built into the book and the fact that the film is 50 years old, I found a lot to like, mostly from a “so bad it’s good” perspective. The tone-deaf presentation of “P.R.-ness” is across-the-board cringey: Natalie Wood’s dialogue accent; the dark casket makeup most of the Sharks wear, probably borrowed from the “Injun” shelf on the lot; that Russ Tamblyn, who plays Riff, was in his late twenties but looked older (“What do you say, Riff?” “Well, that depends, daddy-o: what rhymes with ‘sciatica’?”); Anybodys. Ugh, Anybodys. The tomboy character frequently annoys me elsewhere in pop culture, but the Lori Petty Incinerates The Cheap Seats With Her Amateurish Bellowing portrayal here is particularly irritating.
And at the end of the day, Tony and Maria have known each other — what, 22 hours? Which it’s possible put over, given that they’re supposed to be teenagers, but 1) they’re supposed to be teenagers, and Wood and the risible Richard Beymer both look thirty at minimum; and 2) Wood and the risible Richard Beymer are fucking terrible. I don’t mean about not doing their own singing, because given the “acting” on offer, God knows what would have become of “Somewhere,” so let’s let the professionals handle that. I mean that I have seen grade-school plays with more convincing crying, and more passionate kissing between Liberace and a lady fan of a certain age. You get some championship seventh-grade-girl simpering, though. From Beymer. Guys: he’s the worst.
But Rita Moreno is a treasure; she looks great, she sings great, and she manages to make her lesser castmates look better, not worse by comparison. George Chakiris as Nardo is so charismatic, despite the pounds of makeup on his face, shoe polish in his hair, and unflattering purple whatever-the-hell on his body. It’s not the best glare in the business, but I’ll put it in the top five. Ned Glass as Doc resists the urge to go soapy with his lines. He gets the sadness back into the story.
The production design is pretty sweet too; the credits drag, but then you go into the next sequence with the overhead chopper shot of the skyscrapers. I also liked the little girl in the center of a spiderweb-type chalk drawing on the playground, and the graffiti shark that announced the edge of Shark territory — with maximum cuteness! In another shot, as the Jets gather for the rumble, they’re filmed like rats pouring over the edge of a wall.
But sometimes you just stare at the movie all, “Re…ally?” Wouldn’t a real Puerto Rican pronounce “vamonos” with an initial “B”? Wouldn’t someone have figured out that all the beatnik whistling and snapping wastes time, and alerts enemies and cops to your presence? Couldn’t someone have reblocked Beymer during the “get me too, Chino!” sequence? And what’s with the inappropriately cheery music cues all over the place? “TONY KILLED YOUR BROTHER FINGER CYMBAAAAAAAAAALS” in the what now?
But it’s an American classic, and I’m sure it contains a brilliant drinking game. Possibly more than one.
Tags: 31 Days 31 Films George Chakiris Lori Petty movies Natalie Wood Ned Glass Richard Beymer Rita Moreno Russ Tamblyn shut up musicals this just in Liberace still awesome West Side Story Wing Chun
nd what’s with the inappropriately cheery music cues all over the place? “TONY KILLED YOUR BROTHER FINGER CYMBAAAAAAAAAALS” in the what now?
Heheeeeee . . . and now I can never watch this movie the same way again. West Side Story isn’t one of my favorites, but I do remember really enjoying it in high school Spanish class. Maybe it resonates more with teenagers. Definitely wouldn’t surprise me given the draaaaaaama.
Saw this recently in the theater, and while I felt the dancing was pretty awesome in that larger than life setting, what really caught my attention was that Nardo was 1) super hot and 2) a total bad-ass. How did I miss that when I was 12?
I cannot sit through this movie. First, I don’t like the source material (sorry Will) and second, I don’t really like many of the songs. Sondheim agrees with me on that one at least – he refers to Somewhere as the “a” song. It was music that Bernstein had previously composed but never used – the high notes were all short notes as well so it sounds slightly odd when they sing ‘there’s a place for us. . .’ etc and have to really hit the teeny one syllable word.
Seconding Jennifer M.’s dislike of the source material. People–and teenagers/20somethings to boot–falling so whatever in love in a second’s time makes me want to bang their heads together.
(…wondering at what I’ll stop being surprised at how much I sound like an old fart. Hey you Jets, get off my lawn.)
Always loved “Antony and Cleopatra” for all the things it is that R&J isn’t
That’s the problem with “Teen love so fierce and bright/It burns like tungsten in the night” as the central premise of a movie, especially a modern (at the time) retelling of a Shakespeare-borrowed-it-a-gazillion-years-ago plot.
Shakespeare’s central realization is brilliant: that not only can this kind of love come along but once, but that it must occur within a certain time frame of human development, and that was early adolescence, when the hormones have stretched you, curved you, enflamed your every pore and then sprinted out the door and left you with a forest fire to put out. And in “modern” America, no matter how much formalness is infused with the “staginess” of the musical setting, we are hugely uncomfortable with watching a pair of thirteen year old children fall passionately in love and Do It. And then commit ritual suicide (Yay!)
That’s why (leaving out the unlikeliness of a pair of age appropriate actors being able to carry such huge parts) the “teens” are always cast so much older–it eases the yuck factor, but also highlights the ridiculousness of the rest of the rest: the dancing! the snapping! the posturing! the high notes! You can almost see thirteen year olds taking that shit with enough seriousness to pull it off, but not anyone over fifteen years old at the outside. And once that veil’s whipped off you can’t unsee the rampant ridiculousness of it all.
People often expect me to be into movie musicals and stage musicals because of my interest in the opera, but I only rarely enjoy them. This is not one such case. I watched it once in the 1990s and found it unendurable for a lot of the reasons you cite — it’s badly cast and it never stops clubbing and bludgeoning you and getting up in your face. I do enjoy some of the songs, including “Somewhere” and “Tonight,” but I get more out of them on a cast album or as part of someone’s recital than in dramatic context.
As an actor, Beymer improved with age. As the town mogul on Twin Peaks, he was very entertaining. Not just “well-used scenery chewer” (although that too) but shrewd.
I emphatically prefer the movie version of WSS to the stage version. Having two acts requires the material to emotionally-peak twice, and it doesn’t work that well with this material. The movie rearranges the scenes to build to one climax, which works way better, even with an intermission (which I believe it had, back in the day).
Sorry to burst a Morena bubble, but the only two singers of the five leads who did their own vocals? Chakiris and Tamblyn. This shocked me when I learned it, but apparently Rita was under the weather during recording, and they didn’t want to wait for her to recover.
The role of Tony is simply problematic. There’s nearly no way to play him that’s the least bit manly, and since you’re probably casting young, threading that needle is an awful lot to ask of a kid. If you cast older, than you get…what you got with Beymer. Which is needle not threaded, and icky to boot. On the upside, there’s so much you can do with “Something’s Coming”, it’s worth a try. (At which Beymer….fails. Sigh.)
I’ve heard probably a hundred covers of “One Hand, One Heart” that perfectly capture the intimate poignancy of that song, which means the song Stands Up. Too bad it’s schmaltzified here. But I blame it on the era. Emo-singer-songwriters hadn’t yet emerged, so Big Pop Treatments were really all you could get.
But I tell you what, my sister and I still crack each other up by breaking into “A Boy Like That.”
One other thing: the use of split screen for “Quintet” was brand-spanking new, and, imo, really well-utilized. That’s an easier thing to stage than it is to film without split screen, and the technology had only been used a couple of times before WSS.
Mark me as another who has never liked the source material; I didn’t connect with it as a teen, either, I just thought they were all stupid. (Same with Hamlet, come to think of it.) Perhaps even as a teen I was already old and curmudgeonly.
What I like about WSS is the music, basically. I’m not sure I’ve ever actually sat through the movie, nor seen the entire production through anywhere. But the music is fun, and occasionally “daaaaaammmmnnnn”. I remember listening to “America” a few years ago, for the first time since I was a kid probably, and I was like, “Wow, that is a lot more pointed than I expected of 1957”.
I had “One Hand, One Heart” sung at my wedding during the lighting of the unity candle. I knoooooooow.
Re: the source material, it bugs the hell out of me when people go on and on about R&J being a tragic romance. Wrong! it’s just a tragedy, full-stop. There’s a reason it’s filed with the tragedies and not the romances in all compilations of Shakespeare’s plays. The point of the whole thing was that if the families hadn’t been so hell-bent on this feud, R&J’s “romance” would’ve eventually fizzled out with no harm done. Remember how Romeo was mooning over Rosaline at the beginning? That wasn’t a pointless detail. it was there to show how fickle Romeo is. Teenagers are contrarions, and if he hadn’t been told to stay away from Juliet (and she likewise with him) he would lost interest in her as quickly as he lost interest in Rosaline. The willful misinterpretation of the play is my biggest literary pet peeve. It has infected almost all subsequent versions of it with an idiotic overly romantic tone. It is not a romantic play. /rant over
“Guys: he’s the worst.” That made me laugh for a very long time.
My parents rented this movie for me when I was only 7 or 8, because I was showing a burgeoning interest in theatre. I was absolutely captivated (and went on to get a theatre degree — be careful what you wish for, Mom & Dad!), and it was a LONG time before I found out that these characters were supposed to be TEENAGERS. I mean, holy shit, they’re all ANCIENT.
Anyhoo, I definitely have a special place in my heart for this film, horrendous makeup and all. I still maintain that one of the most beautiful parts of any song happens at the end of “Maria.” Gets me every time.
Well, as a writer of musical theater, I probably *should* be defending WSS more, but I think the points everyone makes are pretty spot-on. Putting a musical on film is tricky to begin with – the creators have to know the differences between how stage works and how film works, and how musicals work on an audience to begin with. There’s an element to live performance – watching someone busting their butt dancing and singing – which is part of what makes musicals really work on an audience. Film gets into you differently. I think one of the best (if not *the* best) stage-to-film translations is The Sound of Music. It’s not very good onstage (in my opinion), but Ernest Lehman really transformed the story and thought about it in filmic terms when he wrote the screenplay (now whenever they do it, they try to put the screenplay changes back onto the stage, which doesn’t really work.)
The age thing with WSS – I wonder if part of the problem was not only that Wood, Beymer, et al were in fact too old, but that at the time in the culture, one wanted to look older rather than younger. Thin excuse but I think that is part of it.
Lipsyncing is one element that takes the “liveness” out of the performance – even more so when you’re lipsyncing to someone else’s voice. (Peter Bogdanovich tried to solve this when he shot At Long Last Love by recording everyone live on-camera … but that didn’t work either because we’re used to more polished studio sound now. Although – if you’re only aware of that movie because it shows up on so many “worst movie of all time” lists – it’s actually not that bad.)
I will say that, with all its too-stagey big-studio-musical faults, there’s a rush of nostalgia I get when I see WSS in a movie theater – it takes me back to the feeling I had when I was a kid and first being fascinated with musicals (it came out before I was born but I think I saw it in one of its revivals when I was around 10.)
And yeah, Tony is a pretty impossible part to play. I think they originally wanted someone else — I forget who – but I have yet to see a great Tony anywhere.
And, yeah, Tony is a pretty impossible character to play.
West Side Story. I’ve seen worse, I’ve seen better. I concur with all of your points.
But that said, I watched “Mame” the musical last weekend, and dear god, there was nothing redeeming about how they trashed the story of that one. Also, they inexplicably cast people who could not sing. Lucille Ball and Bea Arthur are in it and frankly, if I hadn’t seen them on television I’d think they couldn’t act at all. West Side Story looks like a peach in comparison to that turd.
If that’s a challenge, I…do not accept.
While I certainly can’t really disagree with the complaints listed here, I also can’t resist this movie. The songs… the dancing… the fact that not one but two people from it wound up on Twin Peaks… the downward-double-finger-snapping (which my BF always does to make me laugh if we’re in the vicinity of people who look like they might be having a disagreement). And I love Something’s Coming so, so much that I have been known to have outbursts of song if it pops into my head (coworkers don’t much like this).
I learned a while ago that I can skip watching musicals in favor of reading Tom and Lorenzo’s glorious recaps of them. They covered West Side Story here:
http://www.tomandlorenzo.com/2007/04/musical-monday-west-side-story.html
Favorite line: “He’s supposed to be in love with a girl, but spends the whole movie acting like one instead.”
They even covered “Mame”, bless their hearts:
http://www.tomandlorenzo.com/2008/05/musical-monday-mame.html
My mom made me watch that when I was 12 or so, and I just remember thinking that Rita Moreno was way cooler than that milksap Maria, and that Bernardo was way hotter than Tony, and not understanding what my mom saw in the Tony and Maria pairing. Boooooring.
There was a college classmate of mine I nicknamed “Bernardo,” because of his vague resemblance to Chakiris. And I meant it as a very high compliment.
He now designs jewelry, and apparently does not photograph well.
Eeeugh. MAME. Do. Not. Watch. I don’t much like THAT musical to begin with. All people should see Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame, and then stop right there.
Two Mame bits of trivia: Madeline Kahn was cast in the film as Agnes Gooch. She was hilarious – so hilarious that Lucille Ball had her fired (from what would have been her film debut.) Instead she debuted in What’s Up, Doc? and the world was introduced to her brilliance.
Second: In 1968, Judy Garland auditioned for the Broadway production of Mame, as a potential replacement for Angela Lansbury (who originated the role.) She came in and sang the entire score for the producers, and from all accounts gave an incredible performance. She had begged for an audition – she wanted to prove that she still had it – and also wanted to show she was right for a possible film version. The producers, in the end, thought she was too much of a risk – if she missed Broadway performances, that meant refunding tickets, and they didn’t believe she could keep an 8-show-a-week schedule. So they passed, and hired Janis Paige instead. About a year later, Garland died. And in the end, Lucille Ball snagged the film rights and made the monstrosity that is the movie version of Mame. Ick.
Ugh, Mame. In middle school we were forced to sing We Need a Little Christmas as part of our repertoire of Christmas songs. And my mom LOVES that song. I hate it. So much.
I usually defend the WSS score as the best of the era. It’s bolder than the other big musicals’. It uses jazz themes and variations, and manages to be less conventional yet in a familiar way. It has discord and tumult, syncopation and pause. That so much boom! Pow! lends itself to Fosse and Robbins’s balleticism is gorgeous, despite how silly it may look on supposed juvie delinquents. (I agree about the never-gets-old-hilarity of the crouched waist-forearm-extended finger snaps.)
Thank goodness the film excises the odious Fantasy Ballet, which was a seemingly essential theatre trope at the time, but nearly always succeeds in stopping the momentum cold by just going on forever.
Speaking of Russ Tamblyn, I’m afraid this interviewer is not joking: http://gothamist.com/2011/12/14/david_cross.php
Agreeing with Jeanne about the source material — the scene that always gets me with West Side Story is when Anita shows up at the drugstore/ice cream shop/soda fountain, and she’s trying to do something so scary, and there is this tiny moment when things could turn out okay. . . and they blow it, she makes a different choice, and the tragedy unfolds.
I do love the music of WSS, and it makes a lot out of the romance part of the story, but I think the part that keeps storytellers coming back to this same idea over and over (the good storytellers, anyway) is the “star-crossed” part of the story, not the “lovers” part.
Also agree with Profreader that it’s the live performance element of musicals that gets me — same reason I can’t tear myself away from The Sing-Off: they are up there on stage giving it their all, and good performances actually make me teary (even for happy songs) because of my empathy with the performers. That frequently gets lost in the film versions of musicals.
I agree with all the bad points everyone’s listed, however, I still love WSS–I actually saw it on a big screen! Growing up a local second-run movie theater showed all the old musicals on Saturday afternoons, complete with old newsreels and cartoons! Chakiris looked absolutely luminous on the big screen. Brooding, sexy, both sweet and bad boy, wow, my 8 year old heart was bumping along every time he was on screen, even if I didn’t understand exactly why. Somewhere: the life of Jerome Robbins, by Amanda Vaill has lots of interesting stories about the creation, direction and choreography of WWS. And I was surprised to learn JR cast Bea Aurthur as Yenta in the Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof.
My mother saw “West Side Story” during its first run on Broadway. She said the two leads – whose names escape me at the moment – were fantastic. I grew up listening to the soundtrack with those original singers.
My mother has always hated the movie version; although she liked Natalie Wood, the movie was obviously terribly miscast (with the previously noted exception of Rita Moreno, who could not only sing and dance but was also – GASP! – Hispanic).
My only fear is that this movie will be redone with names such as “Swift,” “Ephron”, “Hough,” etc. attached to it.
Wow, I haven’t seen WSS for YEARS. Do they even try to show this in public schools any more? I watched this for the first time in 9th grade as a tie-in to a section we were studying on Shakespeare. Try to imagine the reaction of a room full of fifteen-year-olds to the line, “I feel pretty and witty and GAY!” The teacher knew it was coming too, but what can you do but give an “Okay everybody, moving ON now,” and let the thing run.
Marni Nixon, the actual singer behind Natalie Wood’s sync, wrote a pleasant and dishy memoir a coupla years back (I Could Have Sung All Night). She was the go-to ghost singer for the movies, also doing King and I and My Fair Lady. She also sang under her own name, both on stage and in movies, including Mulan, for all you younguns out there. I recommend the book to those interested in the period, or musicals, or pre-Milli-Vanilli vocal fake-outs.
I was just coming to talk about Marni Nixon’s autobiography, but attica beat me to it. Good read!
WSS will always have a special place in my heart as a fond memory of childhood. And “Somewhere” was one of the first songs that I ever performed for an audience so that’s also special for me.
Rita Moreno is great. I just searched this famous picture of her backstage after her Oscar win (she’s on the phone with someone, I think Marlon Brando) and she looks so happy and thrilled and beautiful, but couldn’t find it.
HOWEVER.
I did find a PDF of an old magazine article about her. It’s amazing:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v491/stinkylulu/stinkylulu/RitaMoreno1956-2.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v491/stinkylulu/stinkylulu/RitaMoreno1956-3.jpg
The images are only surpassed by the copy: “She’s 5’2″ high, weights in at 101 pounds, measures 34-23-35 in the right places and knows what to do with her dimensions…she celebrates this by uncorking a dancing talent which practically melts the celluloid in as exciting an interpretation of a hot-blooded little hedonist as any seen to date.”
When I was in high school I loved both this and the source material. 10 to 15 years later, I know that everyone involved was a total dill. That said, I used to be obsessed with the tomboy character, and always wanted a story/movie/whatever written about her. I mean, a young girl running with a rather rough group of guys? That can’t end well, and why was she even with them? (Was her sister a hooker, or is that part of my backstory fantasy?)
I used to be into so many things, back in high school. Now I’m a sad old Pixar-obsessed crank.
I generally love musicals, and this is no exception, but I recently realized I really only watch for the athletic dance sequences, and fast-forward through the cheezy Tony & Maria storyline. At our house we love to make fun of the dance!fighting that the Jets and Sharks do. Plus, Russ Tamblyn and Rita Moreno both rock, and the America sequence has plenty of opportunity for mockery (we’ve named the Sharks’ dance steps things like ‘bunny ears’ and ‘typewriter’).
(Plus, I sort of have a crush on Baby-John but that’s neither here nor there. What?!)