| Collector's Corner November 2002
 West Side Story
- Starring: Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer,
Russ Tamblyn, George Chakiris, Rita Moreno, Simon Oakland, Ned Glass
- Directed by: Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise
- Theatrical release: 1961
- DVD release: 1998
- Video: Widescreen (anamorphic)
- Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1
- Released by: MGM Home Entertainment
All of you! You all killed him! And my brother.
And Riff.
Not with bullets, or guns. With hate.
Well now I can kill, too, because now I have hate.
-- Maria
The Jets and Sharks are rival gangs
fighting for control of a tiny area on the West Side of Manhattan. Most of the Jets are
from European immigrant families. The Sharks are all Puerto Rican. Bernardo (George
Chakiris) is the leader of the Sharks. Riff (Russ Tamblyn) is the newly appointed leader
of the Jets after the retirement of Tony (Richard Beymer), who went to work in a soda
shop. Things come to a head when both gangs decide it’s time for a fight to the
finish. They meet at a local dance to set the conditions.
Tony wants more out of life than running a gang. But he was
a great leader and fighter, so Riff begs him to come to the dance. While there, he meets
Bernardo’s sister, Maria (Natalie Wood) and they fall into instant Hollywood love.
Both Tony and Maria face unremitting pressure to kill off the nascent romance. But they
are too much in love to consider the consequences and ultimately, their love makes the
hatred between the gangs burn even brighter. The tragedies pile on until we arrive at the
most tragic climax in all of 20th-century film musicals.
West Side Story originally opened on Broadway on
September 26, 1957. It ran for 734 performances. The play has been in production somewhere
in the world almost every day since. When United Artists released the film on October 18,
1961, it quickly became one of the hottest tickets in America. Within three weeks, the
soundtrack jumped into the Billboard Top 40 and by May 1962 it was number one. The West
Side Story LP spent 54 weeks at number one on the Billboard Pop Chart, the longest
time of any album in history. Longer than Thriller, Rumours or Saturday
Night Fever. Longer than Synchronicity, Tapestry and Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band combined. At Academy Award time, West Side
Story walked away with 10 Oscars, the second-highest total in history (Ben-Hur
and Titanic tie for first with 11). Shakespeare would be proud.
The project started in 1949 when Jerome Robbins approached
Leonard Bernstein about creating a tragedy in a musical comedy style (i.e., not
operatic) based on Romeo and Juliet. They had some success five years earlier with
the Broadway musical On the Town. Robbins' idea was to set the tale in Manhattan
with "Romeo" a Protestant boy and "Juliet" a Jewish girl. By the time
he was able to get the idea rolling, New York had a huge influx of Puerto Ricans and the
American public had learned the hard way about juvenile delinquents and gang warfare.
Montagues and Capulets became Jets and Sharks; "Romeo" became Polish and
"Juliet" became Puerto Rican. Robbins brought in Arthur Laurents (Rope, The
Way We Were) to write the gritty and topical dialogue. Bernstein sought out the young
and unheralded Stephen Sondheim to supply the lyrics. Broadway musicals up till then had
never been culturally relevant. Robbins et al. had taken a huge risk. The public
loved it.
United Artists wanted to make sure the transition from
stage to film went as smoothly as possible. They brought in Ernest Lehman (Sabrina,
North by Northwest) to expand the story’s boundaries from a stage to a
neighborhood. (Trivia No.1: 87-year-old Lehman fathered a son this past January. God bless
him.)
They hired one of Hollywood’s greatest directors,
Robert Wise (The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Haunting, The Sound of Music) to
help Robbins, who had only directed plays, never films. Robbins and Wise clashed from the
beginning and, despite the credits, Robbins had little to do with the overall directing of
West Side Story. Robbins felt the large-scale dance scenes had to be ballet perfect
and demanded retake after retake. After running way over budget, United Artists gave the
majority of the responsibility to Wise. Nonetheless, both men received credit (and
Oscars).
Robbins needed a big star and he chose five-foot-tall
Natasha Nikolaevna Zakharenko, aka Natalie Wood (Rebel Without a Cause, The Searchers). Wood had a pleasing voice (you can hear her
singing in Gypsy) but she didn’t have the range for Maria’s showcase
songs. Afraid of a diva-style reaction, Robbins and Wise continually told Wood that they
loved her voice, while they secretly had Marni Nixon dubbing Maria’s vocals at night.
Wood never knew the truth till the film was in the can. Luckily, her acting needs no help.
She skillfully portrays Maria as a dewy-eyed teen forced to suffer the consequences of
racial hatred until she comes to the point of the quote at the top.
Every one of the Jets and Sharks is superb. Try to look
tough and menacing while doing a petit jeté or a pirouette. Go ahead, try. Then
you’ll get an idea of how well these guys pulled off their roles. Especially
Chakiris, who somehow takes a character that looks like a dandy (El guapo is what
the Puerto Ricans would call him) and infuses him with power, grace, danger, and tragedy.
If Beymer comes across a little marshmallow-y as Tony,
it’s probably because no one could make a longing, love-starved, poetic youth seem
three-dimensional. Don’t blame Beymer. Bernstein wrote to his wife just weeks before
the play’s premiere that he was concerned about Tony’s character: "I missed
you terribly yesterday -- we wrote a new song for Tony that's a killer, and it just wasn't
the same not playing it first for you. It's really going to save his character -- a
driving 2/4 in the great tradition (but of course fucked up by me with 3/4s and whatnot)
-- but it gives Tony balls -- so that he doesn't emerge as just a euphoric dreamer."
Bernstein, of course, did more than any other person to
make West Side Story a classic. His music captured a contemporary sound but was
also filled with glorious and memorable tunes: "Maria," "Tonight,"
"Somewhere," "I Feel Pretty," "Something’s Coming."
These songs are classic Great American Songbook titles. Add to that Sondheim’s
lyrics, which carry the wit of Cole Porter along with the grit of the then-current beat
poets.
Bernstein really didn’t know what a classic he had
written. Days before the premiere, he again wrote to his wife: "It's murder, but I'm
excited. It may be something extraordinary. We're having our first run thru for people
on Friday -- please may they dig it!" Dig it they did. A search through All Music Guide for versions of
Bernstein’s songs from the movie yields thousands of results. He had to be especially
pleased at the fanatic way the jazz community adopted his work. The classical folks liked
it, too. Eight months before the film’s premiere, Bernstein assembled his Symphonic
Dances from West Side Story, a work that has been performed by hundreds of symphony
orchestras and recorded dozens of times. Trivia No.2: Nixon felt she should get royalties
from the OST but CBS demurred. Gallantly, Bernstein offered a portion of his royalties to
the singer.
If you ever get a chance, see West Side Story in a
large-screen theater with a 70mm print. The clarity and athleticism of the dance bursts
through in a way no home theater will ever accomplish. As the film opens and the picture
morphs from an abstract painting into New York City, the big screen will induce vertigo.
No DVD can match the experience.
On a smaller scale, the MGM Home Entertainment DVD is all
you could ask for in terms of recreating the film. Beautiful and naturally toned, it even
works on the difficult "Dance at the Gym," with its over-the-top colors and
Vaseline-on-the-lens effects. The sound is clear enough to tell when the engineers are
switching from local microphones to dubs, something I find distracting. The Dolby
remastering crew captures the sound vividly.
Extras, unfortunately, are virtually nil. You get a trailer
and an eight-page booklet. Robert Wise, Ernest Lehman, Stephen Sondheim, Richard Beymer,
Russ Tamblyn, George Chakiris, and Rita Moreno are all still alive (some barely). MGM blew
a great opportunity for a Citizen Kane-quality presentation. I would have loved the
chance to hear Wise talk about Robbins, or Sondheim about Bernstein. Instead, nothing.
Couldn’t we have had something from the prior Criterion and MGM lasers? Who’s
making these decisions? But it’s the film that counts, and at least MGM has done a
fine-looking job with it.
One warning: Some people can never get used to musicals.
The idea of someone stopping the action and singing just drives them crazy. If you fall
into that category, pass by West Side Story. The combination of stylized violence,
dance, and song requires not just a suspension of disbelief, but a desire to dive into the
dream. For me, West Side Story evokes such complex feelings and artistic
appreciation that I can’t imagine a collection without it.
...Wes Marshall
wesm@hometheatersound.com |
