Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’s film of the Bernstein musical still moves like nothing else of its period, and it goes slack whenever the dancing stops. See it for the Jets and the Sharks, and be patient with the lovers.
Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins open on Manhattan from directly above, the island laid out as a pattern of rooftops and car parks, and they hold it long enough that we started to wonder whether anyone was going to turn up. Then the camera drops into a playground and a boy in a blue T-shirt snaps his fingers. West Side Story is Romeo and Juliet moved to the West Side tenements of late 1950s New York, with the Jets and the Sharks in place of the Montagues and Capulets and Robbins’s choreography in place of the swordplay. It is a strange idea, and for about half its 153 minutes it works completely.
Here is the verdict for the sofa. Whenever the gangs are on screen, the film is alive from the soles of its feet up. Whenever Tony and Maria are alone together, it sits down and waits politely for the next number. That is a real flaw, and it does not stop us recommending it.
The Prologue is the reason it lasts. The Jets walk their street in a loose line, Daniel L. Fapp keeps the camera at hip height so the kerb and the brick slide past behind them, and then, with no warning, the walk becomes a leap. We have seen it many times and it still raises the hair on our arms, because Robbins has found a way to make dancing look like the thing these boys would do anyway if they had the space. Leonard Bernstein’s brass jabs rather than swells under them, and the three-note whistle the gangs use runs through the whole score like a threat. Boris Leven gives them real streets here and, for much of the rest, tilted painted tenements with fire escapes stacked like shelves. Irene Sharaff dresses the Jets in faded blue and mustard and the Sharks in purple, red and black, so a wide shot tells you who owns the ground before anyone speaks.
America, on a rooftop, is the number people remember and they are right. Rita Moreno’s Anita argues for New York and George Chakiris’s Bernardo argues against it, and the argument is conducted in skirts Sharaff has built to stand away from the body on the turn. Moreno is the best thing in the film: funny, quick, and later moving without changing key. The dance at the gym is nearly as good, the two gangs performing at each other across a floor until Thomas Stanford’s cutting quickens and the crowd blurs and there are two faces left in focus. It is the one stretch where the romance works, and Beymer and Wood do not say a word in it.
The trouble starts when they do. Ernest Lehman’s screenplay gives Richard Beymer a former gang leader who has grown out of the life, and Beymer plays the growing out as blankness. Beside Russ Tamblyn’s Riff, all coiled shoulders and grin, he barely registers, and the fire escape scene that stands in for the balcony is prettily lit and does not catch. Natalie Wood is warmer and sharper, but her singing is dubbed, as most critics have noted, and the voice that comes out is not quite the woman we have been watching. In the lovers’ scenes we found ourselves admiring the lighting and working out how long until the Jets came back. The dialogue between numbers is where the film’s age shows. Simon Oakland’s Lieutenant Schrank, a sour and openly bigoted cop, is the one adult who feels like a person; Ned Glass’s Doc is there to be disappointed in everybody, and the lines about what the city does to its young are delivered as speeches.
Most critics rate it a little higher than we do, and the disagreement is about the middle. They forgive the lovers because the dancing around them is so good. We are not sure a film of two and a half hours gets to coast on its best forty minutes, though this one comes closer than most. Cool, in a garage, with Tucker Smith’s Ice trying to hold a roomful of boys down to a snap and a hiss, tells you more about what is going on inside these kids than any line Lehman gave them.
The second half, which we will not describe, is slower and darker than the first, and the PG certificate is honest about the knives. Watch it on the biggest screen you own with the sound turned up, and give the lovers the benefit of the doubt. The boys on the fire escapes are why you came.
