Note: The following piece is packed with spoilers for this film. While I assume everyone knows the ending to both this musical and its source, Romeo and Juliet, I’m putting this warning here anyway.
I first saw West Side Story in a sixth grade musical theater class. It was on one of those old box TVs on a wheel cart, more than likely on a VHS tape. I’m sure the screening must have been divided up over two or three class sessions, given the two and a half hours’ traffic of the film.
What did eleven year-old me think of the film itself? Honest to God, I don’t remember. I had no idea how groundbreaking the original musical was considered in its day or how wildly successful its 1961 film version was, so I went in with no preconceived notions of greatness. I remember snickering at the dated slang terms used by the characters, like “daddy-o,” but also enjoying the music numbers, particularly “America” and “Cool.” Thinking back on it, this film was my first exposure to the Romeo and Juliet story in general.
My second viewing of the film came during my freshman year of high school, when my English teacher was doing the compulsory unit on Romeo and Juliet. We got to watch three movie versions of the story: the beautiful Franco Zeffirelli film, the insane Baz Luhrmann version, and then West Side Story. My memories are a bit sharper here. At the time, I loved the Zeffirelli version (I and all the other fourteen-year-old girls in the classroom were bawling by the end) and thought the Luhrmann version was ridiculous and hated it (now I think it’s ridiculous and I love it). As for WSS, I liked it a lot on that viewing, mostly for the same reasons other generations have loved it: the music is catchy and emotionally overwhelming, and the dancing is divine.
I had probably seen the movie two or three times since then, always on TCM. I stopped using cable around 2019, so it’s been at least five years since I last saw WSS.
My relationship to the film since age eleven has largely been warm without blazing over into outright adoration, which might explain why I wasn’t as scandalized when Steven Spielberg elected to remake it a few years back. Classic movie fans react badly when modern Hollywood touches “our” films– especially since most remakes are either forgettable mediocrities or disasters. However, the Spielberg remake was critically loved– the key term here being “critically,” since the general public avoided seeing it. Blame both the lingering COVID-19 pandemic and general disinterest.
I got around to the Spielberg version a few weeks ago, largely on a whim and with low expectations. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It goes for a more “realistic” tone and fleshes out the backstories of several characters, giving it an entirely different vibe from the original and therefore justifying its existence. You can sense the filmmakers’ passion for the material in every frame and the performers all did phenomenal work.
Seeing the 2021 movie made me want to see the 1961 version again. So I rented the DVD from the library and popped it in last Saturday night, all the lights in my apartment extinguished.
In case you’ve never seen it or don’t know much about it, here’s a quick run-down. The story is set in 1950s New York City and centers on conflict between two teenage gangs, the Jets and the Sharks. The Jets are made up of white second-generation Polish immigrants and the Jets are migrants from Puerto Rico.
Tony (Richard Beymer) is an ex-Jet who nevertheless remains friends with Riff (Russ Tamblyn), the gang leader. Maria (Natalie Wood) is the younger sister of Bernardo (George Chakiris), the leader of the Sharks, and more or less a surrogate sister to Anita (Rita Moreno), Bernardo’s vivacious girlfriend. When Tony and Maria meet at a dance, they fall in love immediately. Unfortunately, the Jets and Sharks are prepping for a “rumble” in which they plan to beat each other senseless. Tony and Maria hope to stop the fight and to find a way to be together despite the hatred around them.
This being an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, it ends about as well as you would expect.
Four things stuck out to me after rewatching the film…
1. West Side Story is a great example of the type of transitional Hollywood film made in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The 1961 West Side Story occupies a fascinating period in American film history. There seems to be this oversimplified idea that movies were straight-jacketed to the Production Code until the one-two punch of The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, but films started nudging at the Code in earnest around the late 1950s. The 1957-1966 period is chock full of boundary-pushing films that introduced more adult content into Hollywood cinema, paving the way for the more permissive attitudes that eventually killed the Code altogether by 1968.
West Side Story is one of these transitional films. Both Anita and Bernardo, and Tony and Maria have premarital sex. The authority figures are presented as unsympathetic and corrupt, openly flaunting their racial bias against the Sharks and taunting the Jets about their awful home lives. There are mentions of drug abuse and prostitution. Most infamously, the Jets try to gang rape Anita when she goes to Doc’s to inform Tony that Maria will be late for their meeting.
While it’s easy to mock West Side Story as cheesy in some ways, particularly goofy fake slang like “cracko jacko,” it’s pretty gritty by Old Hollywood standards, blending the artifice of a traditional movie musical with flashes of unglamorous reality.
Speaking of which…
2. The opening scene is absolutely brilliant.
The prologue sequence setting up the conflict between the Jets and the Sharks is so stylistically different from the rest of the film that it almost feels like a mini-movie within the overall production. Shot on-location in New York City, there’s a tactile quality that’s lacking in the set-bound scenes to follow. To be fair, the obvious sets lend the film an abstractness– a sense of heightened reality if you will. Such artifice makes it easier to settle into a universe where people fall madly in love within seconds and break out into perfectly choreographed dance routines. I am not complaining about the subsequent artifice, only pointing out how radically different it feels from the prologue.
The first aerial shots of the city not only situate the story in a particular time and place, but also lend a sense of irony once we cut to the wordless conflict between the two gangs. The Jets and the Sharks are fighting over a meager bit of territory– a rather insignificant block in the grander scheme of New York City, but of vital importance to their teenage minds.
I love so many of the little details in the performances and blocking. The Jets intimidating the other kids in the park, but making sure not to trample on a little girl’s chalk drawing, as though they were a pack of schoolyard Machiavellian regents, dispensing terror and generosity where they see fit. Bernardo pounding a fist against a brick wall, channeling a simmering rage beneath his intense gaze. Just all around a great example of showing versus telling.
3. Tony and Maria’s romance is the weakest part of the film, though not fatally so.
Okay, so this is a common opinion among the musical’s critics, but it never hit me until now how anemic the Tony and Maria story is until this watch. Despite this being a Romeo and Juliet retelling and Natalie Wood being top-billed, the love plot takes up about a third of the film at most and that third is overshadowed by the other characters, who are all funnier, sexier, and all around more exciting to watch.
Some might say this issue is present in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and therefore baked into the narrative by design. After all, everyone’s favorite character in that is Mercutio, Romeo’s wise-cracking best friend. However, I think Romeo and Juliet have more meat to them than that. For one thing, Romeo is flightier than Tony and more is made of his public “macho” persona as opposed to the more sensitive person he is with Juliet. (In case you haven’t read the play since high school, after the tenderness of the balcony scene, Romeo rejoins his pals and brags about how his “pump” is “well-flowered”– a dirty joke about how much he’s scored with girls.) He’s no Hamlet, but he may as well be compared to Tony, who doesn’t have much of a dark side at all and isn’t believable as an ex-gang member.
If there’s any power to the Tony character, it’s in his lovely music numbers. Sung with poignant, aching beauty by Jimmy Bryant for Richard Beymer, Tony’s romantic yearnings stick out of the city streets like a flower growing through cracks in the pavement.
Maria is the meatier of the two parts to be sure, going from idealistic ingenue to an embodiment of the suffering brought about by the gang warfare. I admit I don’t think the Maria performance is one of Natalie Wood’s stronger efforts on the whole, but her rage and pain in the final scene are so powerful. When she screams “Don’t you TOUCH HIM!” and throws herself over Tony’s corpse to keep the police away, I never fail to get chills.
However, I wish that passion were more present when Tony was actually breathing. Wood and Beymer share little chemistry, and anyone playing Maria and Tony need enough chemistry to fuel a sun in order to make the love at first sight trope feel credible. This lack of chemistry may have been due to on-set tensions. Wood didn’t want Beymer for the part and no doubt he was well aware. I can only imagine how difficult that made feigning overwhelming passion for the both of them.
Regardless, I was still invested in their love enough to be upset when it all falls apart, if only because West Side Story keeps intact the core tragedy of Shakespeare’s star-cross’d lovers. It’s not just that they’re horny kids making bad decisions or even that they die. Romeo and Juliet is essentially about two idealists trying to create a parallel reality for themselves in order to escape a violent, ugly world, and in the end, they lose.
Tony and Maria are similarly dreamers, hoping for a world where their love is unchallenged by hatred. There is a childlike quality to their romance, particularly during the “One Hand, One Heart” sequence in which they playact a wedding ceremony. Mannequins stand in for their families, who would no doubt disapprove of their union in reality. The best they can hope for is what they get from Anita, who clearly thinks their relationship is a bad idea but tolerates it quietly. At first, anyway…
Oh, Anita– there’s a fabulous character! A stand-in for Shakespeare’s Nurse, Anita brims with humor and enthusiasm for life. In many ways, she is the most tragic character. Her fervent belief in the American Dream is corroded by Bernardo’s death and then destroyed altogether after the Jets attack her, a moment accompanied by a frenzied, mocking rendition of the melody of her big number, “America.” Her reluctant tolerance of Maria and Tony’s romance– and the hopeful belief in a more peaceful future it represents– shatters entirely, and she exits the movie an embittered woman void of faith in a brighter future.
I’m also fond of Riff and Bernardo. The most interesting thing about both characters is that you get the feeling that under more favorable circumstances, they would be good friends. They’re both witty, vivacious guys, and loyal to the people they care about. They co-operate well anytime they have to trick the police into thinking they aren’t on the verge of maiming one another in yet another brawl. However, the hatred between the groups is too powerful to make any such alliance possible. That enmity is nourished by the rampant racism and dysfunction of the world around the characters. Just as Romeo and Juliet were cursed by misaligned stars, the kids in WSS are cursed by an awful environment that encourages self-destructive behavior and a cycle of violence.
4. The ending is more ambiguous than I remembered.
While West Side Story adheres to the structure of Shakespeare’s original, the ending does not kill off both lovers. Tony is murdered but Maria remains alive. In his “Great Movies” column, movie critic Roger Ebert felt this was a concession to “a powerful bias in show business toward happy endings.”
But is this really a happy ending? This ending is arguably bleaker than Shakespeare’s. Romeo and Juliet both die, but their deaths end the feud, bringing about a “glooming peace.” But Tony’s death is hardly going to end the societal problems that fueled the gang warfare: racism, poverty, cyclical rage. And even if Maria had gone through with shooting the gang members and then herself, nothing would have changed. The film itself acknowledges this when Doc accuses the kids of “mak[ing] this world lousy,” and Action replies, “We didn’t make it, Doc.”
The big question for me is what will become of Maria and Anita’s relationship. Anita no longer believes in the American Dream and her hatred of the Jets is cemented. Maria is also enraged, though perhaps moved by the brief reconciliation of the Jets and Sharks in the basketball court. As she follows the makeshift funeral procession, one wonders what Maria and Anita will have to say to one another when they meet again.
At best, the survivors of the tragedy may begin the healing process between their two communities, but that optimism is a cautious, fragile thing. That ambiguity in the finale keeps the story from descending into mawkishness.
So, did this movie still hold up for me?
For the most part, yes. It has its flaws, sure– not just the thin Tony and Maria relationship, but also the irony of making a film dealing with racism that has its non-white characters in brownface make-up that often looks like it was applied with a paint roller. In terms of narrative depth, the Spielberg version has the edge, fleshing out the characters and giving them stronger, more concrete motivations.
Still, even though there are those who prefer the grittier, grounded setting of the remake, I lean more towards the ethereal, expressionist artifice of the 1961 film. And a lot of the performances are still very strong and iconic. It’s not hard to see why this movie was wildly popular when it came out and in the decades to follow– and on an international scale too! According to Elizabeth Wells’ book-length study of West Side Story, the film was particularly popular in Japan, where it was common for the average moviegoer to have seen it five or six times.
Ultimately, I find myself agreeing with Ken Anderson of the fantastic Le Cinema Dreams blog when it comes to evaluating both the 1961 and 2021 films:
As best I could, I’ve tried to keep comparisons between the two West Side Story films to a minimum. The reason why can be found in Stephen Sondheim’s 2010 memoir Finishing the Hat. In it, he relates an anecdote about nervously inviting Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman to see his 1973 Broadway musical A Little Night Music, which Sondheim & Hugh Wheeler had adapted from Bergman’s 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night.
At the end of the show, Sondheim was quick to apologize to the filmmaker for the liberties taken, whereupon Bergman calmed his fears with a perceptive observation: “No, no, Mr. Sondheim, I enjoyed the evening very much. Your piece has nothing to do with my movie, it merely has the same story.”
That’s how I feel about West Side Story 1961 and 2021. The world can accommodate both magnificent musicals. One doesn’t have to replace or cancel out the other. And as I have fallen in love with each, there’s no need for me to have to choose between them. They’re both superb, entirely different movies. They merely share the same story.
Well said.
The original trailers for WSS proclaimed that “unlike other classics” the film grows “younger” instead of older. Watching in 2024, I’d say not so much, but the film retains much of its emotional power and spectacle quality sixty-plus years onward. The music and choreography still make for an unforgettable cinematic experience.
Sources:
“West Side Story” by Roger Ebert
West Side Story: Cultural Perspectives on an American Musical by Elizabeth A. Wells
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