West Side Story -- a review

 

First watch this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5GJLwWiYSg

This, friends, is the best movie I've ever seen. Yes, just like the original 1957 Broadway play, it is a musical. So if you do not like musicals, you need not watch it. And if you like musicals because they are joyously light entertainment, you may not want to watch it.

William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet inspired Jerome Robbins' original Broadway production of West Side Story. 

        William Shakespeare 1597                                                        Jerome Robbins 1957        

The young daughter and son of two rich,                             A young Puerto Rican girl and white boy

powerful Veronese families fall in love.                               from poor families fall in love.

Two households, both alike in dignity                                 Two gangs, both alike in poverty 

(In fair Verona, where we lay our scene),                            in Manhattan's Upper West Side.

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,                         A neighborhood divided by race,

Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.                     being torn down by Urban Renewal.

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes                         Both gangs are losing their "turf."  

A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;                         A pair of star-crossed lovers meet.

           ....                                                                              

The fearful passage of their death-marked love                   Hate warps their death-marked love.

And the continuance of their parents’ rage,                          If their love cannot defeat hate.         

Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.                     Can death?

West Side Story is set in the mid-1950s in Manhattan's Upper West Side. The blue-collar neighborhood is already stressed by limited resources and racial strife. Add to that Urban Renewal. New York City intended to remake substandard inner city housing and limited or deficient community services into a clean, safe place for people to live. It, however, ended up destroying neighborhoods and displacing poor and powerless people.

Robbins' Broadway musical reimagines Shakespeare's wealthy and powerful Veronese Montagues and Capulets with New York City street gangs. Tony, a former member of the white Jets and best friend of the gang's leader, Riff, falls in love with Maria, the sister of Bernardo, the leader of the Puerto Rican Sharks. Their love story inflames already explosive neighborhood racial tensions. 

The musical's dark theme focusing on real life, contemporary social problems ending in violence and tragedy expressed in music and dance marked a turning point in American musical theatre.

From the mid-'50s into the '70s, West Side Story's theme was real life experience for the people living in Manhattan's Upper West Side neighborhood. In April, 1955, Mayor Robert J. Wagner, Jr.'s Slum Clearance Committee approved Lincoln Square for Urban Renewal. Committee Chair Robert Moses defended his forced displacement of poor and minority communities saying, "I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without moving people as I hail the chef who can make omelets without breaking eggs."

The Broadway production was nominated for six Tony Awards, including Best Musical, in 1958, winning two. The 1961 film adaptation, co-directed by Robert Wise and Robbins, starring Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and won ten, including Best Picture. 

2021 Enter Steven Spielberg
Is there anything he can't do? And do it better?

I chose this photo of Spielberg, because in it, he looks like someone I would like to know. Okay, so I've never seen Jaws or Saving Private Ryan and don't intend to, but his movies -- The Color Purple, Schindler's List, Lincoln, The Post, and now the remake of West Side Story make me think he is the kind of man I would like to know.

What is different, 1961 to 2021? Lots and little. The story is the same. 

The cinematography has, as one would expect, changed the most in the 60 years since the first West Side Story movie. Technology, technology! Remember they didn't even have cell phones in 1961. No human had yet stepped on the moon. The movie industry was still dangling space ships from wires.

                

from the 1961 movie                                     from the 2021 production

The new production's light and color seem to heighten the sense of an old neighborhood being torn down to be rebuilt, all shiny and new, for shiny new people because its current residents will not be able to afford to live there.

Top: Rita Moreno as Anita in 1961. Scene shot on a set in a studio.
Bottom: Ariana DeBose as Anita in 2021. Scene shot on the streets of Harlem.

2021 Rita Moreno
as Valentina,
the voice of reason in 
Spielberg's West Side Story

The Sharks' leader and Maria's brother Bernardo

  
1961 Sharks                                              2021 Sharks      

        George Chakiris definitely sexier            David Alvarez, pretty attractive, too  

The Jets' leader and Tony's best friend, Riff

              

                         1961 Jets too cool                                    2021 Jets too eager                                              Russ Tamblyn                                               Mike Faist                 

The Balcony scene

1961

 
Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood

I didn't know if the new Tony and Maria, Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler, could come up to Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood, but they do. If anything, they seem younger which makes the "love at first sight" premise more believable. And their being so quickly swept away by their passion without regard for the tragically strong passions their own would provoke.

2021

Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler

Leonard Bernstein's music and Stephen Sondheim's lyrics are unchanged, "Almost perfect in every way."

Gustavo Dudemel conducted The New York Philharmonic, recording about 80 percent of the score in New York City. Then the Covid lockdown hit. Shifting to Los Angeles, post production, Dudemel conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic to finish recording the music. 

A man named Justin Peck, just 34 years old, did the choreography for Spielberg's movie. It's possible his parents weren't even born when the first West Side Story movie was made.

The music and choreography build a solid emotional base for the story.

Spielberg uses Shakespeare's pacing -- build tension then break it with humor. Let the audience relax, then drop the hammer.

In this production, Spielberg follows the threatening behavior at a school dance and an even more aggressive clash on the street between the two gangs with a decidedly humorous scene in the court room. Tension builds again only to be broken by Maria.

Celebrating her new love, she whirls and twirls through the department store where she works as an after-hours cleaner, singing "I Feel Pretty." It's light-hearted and colorful, but reminds us that Maria and her fellow cleaners are too low on the social register to shop in the store they clean.

When Maria gets off work, the hammer drops.

The Rumble -- 2021
Take overhead photography,
emphasize shadows,
add music, dance,
threaten death.

Murder happens. More murder happens. Nothing can stop the violence except more murder and threat of murder.

The terrible fabric of violence between people, against love, against hope, woven of music and dance will break your heart.

The Post -- A Movie Review

          Real -- Then              Hollywood -- Now   

                             

Real headline from June 18, 1971, "Documents Reveal U.S. Effort in '54 to Delay Viet Election"
First of a Series
By Chalmers M. Roberts
By THE WASHINGTON POST

Real headline from the Denver Post which picked up the story from The Washington Post,
"Fitness devices expose troops"
By Liz Sly
By THE WASHINGTON POST
January 28, 2018 at 6:04 pm

A striking similarity, don't you think?

There are differences. The first headline was on a hard copy of a newspaper. Perhaps the tactile nature of the bearer of bad news made it all the more shocking. Not to mention the fact that newspapers, printed using Linotype machines to produce lines of type then set into the printer, left ink smudges on your breakfast hands.

The second headline showed up on my laptop as I read my digital edition of The Denver Post this morning. (For the curious reader. No printer's ink smudges here.)

Steven Spielberg has done it again. Another excellent movie. The Post staring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks is about a newspaper that prints information the United States Government (You know, that government "of the people, by the people and for the people") would rather "the people" not know.

Actually, just as there was more to those days than the Vietnam war, there is much more to this movie. Women's rights, a mega-defensive President. (At least Nixon's expletives were deleted.)

What the movie got wrong. Not in the opening scenes where the soldiers pushed through threateningly quiet, dense jungle, unable to see their enemy. Or the soldiers amid the noise and chaos of injury and loss following a battle. And maybe the soldiers would have referred to the "long-hair," Daniel Ellsberg instead of "that old guy." What was wrong in the opening scenes was that the soldiers looked too old. The average age of American soldiers in Vietnam was 22 compared to WWII and Afghanistan when they were 26. Four years difference is not much, is it? They're all too young.

What The Post gets right is Robert McNamara's glasses and the part in his hair. And the times.

Meryl Streep's portrayal of Katherine Graham is stunning. She gives us a woman who grew up in luxury and privilege. She married. She raised children. She gave the best parties, attended by the best people, including Washington's great and powerful. A woman who lived like she was supposed to until her husband died. Worse yet. Her husband committed suicide and left her to run a newspaper.

As publisher, Graham was certainly not responsible for the business on a daily basis. She had a Board for that. All men. She had an Executive Editor responsible for the newspaper's content. Also a man.

Tom Hanks gives us the editor Ben Bradlee. His character is not nuanced. He's the gungho newspaper guy. His first concern is to beat the competition -- The New York Times. Which brings up the question of the Constitution's First Amendment right to a free press.

That, in turn, brings up the fact that Bradlee's Big Boss is a woman.

For my money, the absolute best scene in the movie is when Bradlee's wife describes for him precisely what Graham's situation is. She is not prepared by her background or her sex's recognized position in society to shoulder the responsibility of defending Freedom of the Press. Such a decision would require her to abandon her loyalties to friends high in the government. To that government itself. Not to mention the very real possibility that she could be imprisoned for publishing classified information from what would come to be called The Pentagon Papers.

Worst case scenario, Bradley might do some time in prison. He might lose his job. He would definitely become high-profile in the world of journalism and would be in high demand for another job.

Graham, on the other hand, could lose her family's business. Their income. The jobs of hundreds of people who worked for her. Her position in her community. Her friends. Her father and husband's legacies.

SPOILER ALERT!!! In case you weren't born when all this went down, were still doing your hippie-dippy drugs, or living your own life safe and secure oblivious to your country's crises of faith ....

She did decide to run the story. The audience where I watched the movie broke into applause. And that's not all. The movie ends with a night watchman calling in a possible break-in at the Watergate office building.

Here we are folks -- 2018 almost half a century later. Less than a week before I saw the movie I took part in the Women's March. More than fifty-thousand of us in Denver. We were of all ages and ethnicities and genders and preferences. And there were many thousands more across this nation as we endure another crisis of faith in our country.

Freedom of the Press is included in the First Amendment to the Constitution for good reason. Remember:  “If a nation expects to be ignorant & free, ... it expects what never was & never will be. Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.”  -- Thomas Jefferson