Before turning to why Stephen Spielberg in his new version of “West Side Story” has created a gem and is successful at, once again, reviving movie musicals, after a considerable lapse, all the way back to “Chicago”, from 2002, because “LaLa Land”, from 2016, was a failure whether because the two stars had no chemistry or because the music was so poor, or because the genre of musical comedy, like the genre of the western, is just dead, the movie audience not relating to such vehicles, a more general point needs to be made. The first decade and a half of the talkies presented musicals as spectacular and artificial events and included futuristic mock resorts, such as in the Astaire-Rogers movie, “Top Hat”, from 1935, where the two played the Picolino, or else used the production of a musical as the excuse for offering up to the audience fanciful sets and costumes and masses of chorus girls and boys, as happens in dance number in “Gold Diggers of 1935”. Perhaps the last of these was Astaire dancing with Eleanor Powell in “Broadway Melody of 1940” where the set for the biggest event was said to have been the most expensive movie set manufactured up to that time, unless one includes from 1946 “Till The Clouds Roll By” a biopic about Jerome Kern which uses the starpower of MGM to do a medley of Kern’s greatest hits, topping it off with Frank Sinatra singing “Ol Man River” while wearing a baggy double breasted white suit with overly large lapels. Later renditions of that song sung while wearing formal wear rather than the dress of a stevedore became something of a joke. Something different was already available in the 1943 ”Meet Me in St. Louis” but it was a period piece and so might overlook that a convention of movies had turned the corner.
What happened next was that movie musicals took on naturalistic settings. The songs and dances flowed out of and into the plot and their settings. From “On the Town” (1949) on, the settings for musicals were done with some kind of actuality, not on stage sets fantastic and sensational, but in ordinary places where people nevertheless get up and dance and sing. The best example of that is “Singing in the Rain”, from 1952. The title song and its accompanying dance were done on a soundstage, and Kelly was repeatedly drenched in water, but the idea is that a smitten guy might actually do that even if he could not do that as well. When Kelly and Reynolds and Donald O'Connor sing and dance with only some sofas as props, that is all they need to create a fine visual image of the sofas being upturned. That is the art of realistic musicals. Fred Astaire had a year before in “Royal Wedding” danced on the walls, but that trick was outdated, merely a cinematic device replaced by greater sophistication.
Spielberg has always been excellent at providing a clear story line, as when an exterrestrial, ET, is placed in a suburban cul de sac and explores what might happen next. In the present case, Spielberg does not live in a late medieval story of a forever joust between clans for no reason. Instead, he places the story as beginning and remaining in a twenty block area which is in the process of being demolished to be replaced by Lincoln Center, and so the two gangs are remnants of a culture to be destroyed forever. The question is what will happen to them on the brink of destruction. Will they destroy themselves rather than look forward to a better day? Spielberg imagines that area in a hyperrealism, reminiscent of the naturalistic style adopted in ``Detective Story”, from 1951, and other movies of the late Forties and the Fifties when cameras could go outdoors and use their towns as realistic settings for drama. The high school dance, perhaps the best production number of the movie, is set in a real looking high school gym not gushed up, only the dancing and the movie transforming it into glamour and so in keeping with the naturalistic style of the post war movie musicals. There are also a few streets that may also have been actual exteriors, the set designer finding ways to cut around the parts of the area that had been changed since then or accomplished through special effects so as to make it more real rather than more fanciful. In fact, I thought I recognized some of the blocks as part of the West Side.
One trick Spielberg accomplished was to rid the movie of fake tragedy by neglecting to refer to Shakespeare. Tragedy requires inevitability while simple melodrama requires unfortunate circumstances. Experiencing tragedy makes an audience grim or stoic, but instead I cried a lot about the fates of the characters because they were lost souls who could not overcome the cards they had been played.They are pathetic rather than brave and the Bernstein version never overcame the confusion between the Sharks and the Jets being victims rather than heroes. The even bigger trick that Spielberg accomplished, however, was to make the area claustrophobic both as far as the story is concerned in that people are trying to break out of their routines but also in that people are seen so much in close up that they are breathing into one another’s space and are surrounded by the hulks in the process of demolition and so not capable of looking at the rest of manhattan that is so close nearby. That, in fact, is true to gang life in that gang members do not go fr from their own turf, afraid of what is not very far. Maria and Tony go off to the Cloisters so that they can pray and sort of get married, only a train ride and an eternity of consciousness away from New York, capturing only rituals for ritual’s sake.The entire drama takes place in those narrow precincts, such as the deteriorating docks where Tony and his friends dance around who will get the gun that the gang has purchased as his most dangerous weapon to threaten others in the gang rumble.
And that dancing. Spielberg is correct to rely on the fact that the original Jerome Robbins choreography had in fact carried the entire affair in that the rumbles are danced as well as the confrontations and the dances, nothing offered to the fantasy of dance or to it being a stage play. Dance is just an expression of emotions and they are done in ensembles and with, as I recall, no duets or solos, there being ample opportunity to have tony and maria express their love in dance. Rather, the dances elaborate cruelty and group solidarity. The dance also, as in the dance about the gun, is used to move the plot forward, something that doesn’t happen in the most accomplished of film musicals. The same is true of the songs. They are not pauses in the plot whereby someone proclaims their love or feelings, but are almost sung through and as accompaniment, sometimes only on the soundtrack, as happens in Richard Lesters “It's a Hard Day’s Night” where the Beatles were largely liberated from having to stand still and sing because they could dance around and do hijinks while their songs were the accompanying background. Here, in Spielberg, the music has a singular tone from Bernstein without emphasizing or separating the tunes and so is encasing, as are the sets and the dance.
The sociologizing of gang behavior is rather weak, reflecting the romanticizing of gangs by Leonard Bernstein and others who invited left wing hoodlums into their spires. The Sharks and the Jets are dirty and badly clothed, but all they seem to want is pride of identity against what the new movie claims that the Puerto Ricans are upwardly mobile while the Poles are going to remain the dregs and outcasts of social life. Both gangs are made of dancing hoodlums rather than engaging in drugs, robberies and random violence against the ordinary people which are in fact the marks that make gang life sinister. The officer Krupkie song is much too sophisticated for these uneducated louts but is rather a way for Bernstein could make fun of his own friends for withdrawing the facts of malice about gang life. But in the Spielberg movie, the song is done with a dance which makes it forget the cleverness of the lyrics.
Both musicals make the women more admirable than the men. The women want a little fun and romance, but they are engaged in work and family while the men strut to give themselves some dignity they do not deserve and are filled with ill suppressed rage. They are also rather dumb in that they are surprised and anguished that aa gang fight where people bring knives and pipes and knives, never mind a gun, finds one of them dead. Why would you expect otherwise? Tony is drawn back into his violent life right after having declared to Maria that he had been so shaken at nearly having killed someone that he would go straight. Why is gangland so attractive except that it gives people a chance to dance?The flaw in Bernstein’s basic conception was that there had to be a tragic course because it was supposed to follow the Shakespearean trajectory rather than because it was earned within the story on its own. That is why the whole project was pretentious? It was made up by alluding to Shakespeare and so making the viewers who had run across “Romeo and Juliet” in high school assignments as sophisticated.I wouldn’t assign R and J within the curriculum because it is so corrosive and unhealthy. Shakespeare thought love was a kind of madness that afflicted young people and led them to delusions anda morbid drive for mutual deaths. In Spielberg, frenzied love is regarded as a fact of life and there is no use trying to deny it. Maybe if Tony had waited long enough to confirm whether Maria had been shot he may not have rushed to get Bernardo to kill him and the two could have run away to some other place and had time to grow up.Weak plotting, but who cares? It's a musical.
Spielberg would have accomplished a worthwhile endeavor even if he had just updated “West Side Story”. The original had Maria played by Natalie Wood, a commendable actress but nevertheless clearly white, following the Hollywood tradition of having asians and blacks portrayed by whites. This time, Spielberg cast a Puerto Rican girl as Maria. Rachel Zegler was a good choice because she has charm and poise and expression and so I expect that she could play dramatic roles without being typecast as Puerto Rican. Anita was played back then by the young Rita Moreno and is now played by a dark skinned girl, another breakthrough of sorts, and it is touching that Moreno, at 90, played a leading supporting role as the woman who had mentored Tony and also served as a producer for the new film. People find vindication of what the theme says, which is that groups move upwardly mobile. Spielberg, however, did more than that.
Spielberg created a fresh new kind of musical where the music wedded together the plot, the dancing and the singing as well as these fresh darker faces to create an ensemble that was through sung, like an opera, in that the pounding rhythms and movements and quick splicing provided a claustrophobic experience different from the one already referred to. It was not in a place and in a time. It was also in the sense of being insular or self-contained, following its own laws for creating a theatrical and movie experience without relying on the old convention of having musicals self-contained within a theatre or a music hall, all life contained in that metaphor of utopia and dystopia. It is a bit scary to see Ginger Rogers go off in a gondola beyond the self contained resort idyll constructed for “Top Hat”. Better to stay at home and dance the Picolino in the square beside the lagoon. Instead, the twenty blocks of desolation of Spielberg’s “West Side Story'' are to vanished in a year and the gangs will be antiquated but for that moment they exist as a complete world whose conventions include song and dance and pregnant moments, and not a bit idyllic but rather drenched in death and forebodings of how people will be very different. The Lincoln Center area before the construction goes up is to be as gone as is the wind. The place and the people are as etherial as is Brigadoon,that insularity and of a moment ending found in many geat musicals such as the original 1936 “Showboat”, which we remember has a long coda when Enola’s daughter grows up to be a star, and even “My Fair Lady” which is still so relevant in its Feminism but is also a quintesseential moment of the Edwardian Age.
Gene Kelly, at the end of “Singing In The Rain '', yells from the stage to stop Debbie Reynolds from running from the theatre, asking her back as the true star of the movie for which she did voice over. The stage convention of having events in life joined with a stage production so that what is happening in theatrical life is real life is satisfying though it encloses people in that Reynolds now has to be a star because there is nothing else to be. Spielberg does that to the people in “West Side Story”, the hoodlums having their brief reign, but that is done without the need for the device of theatre, only doomed by history, while the original play and the original movie made it a satire about its source rather than a very peculiar and unattractive piece of a kind of life on its own. The people are not well dressed and the apartments are shabby. The only nice place is the Gimbels store where the Puerto Rican girls work. The neighborhood is well rid of its sluminess and that perception remains when the Spielberg movie is over and that is Spielberg’s major accomplishment. Hurrah for urban renewal.