Jerome Robbins

A boy in a blue T-shirt snaps his fingers. The Jets walk their street in a loose line, the camera down at hip height so the kerb and the brick slide past behind them, and then, with no warning, the walk becomes a leap. Nobody has told us it was coming and nobody on screen behaves as though anything has happened. That is Robbins in a sentence: the dancing is how the story gets told. He spent his working life on Broadway and in the ballet studio and came to the cinema exactly once, sharing the direction of West Side Story (1961) with Robert Wise. It is not much of a filmography. It is enough.

The career runs almost entirely away from the screen. He danced in Broadway choruses, joined American Ballet Theatre in 1940, and made his name with the ballet Fancy Free (1944), which grew into the musical On the Town. From 1949 he was at New York City Ballet under George Balanchine while directing and choreographing Broadway shows on the side. In 1957 he conceived, directed and choreographed the stage West Side Story, to Leonard Bernstein's music and Stephen Sondheim's lyrics, and the film followed four years later. Afterwards came Fiddler on the Roof (1964) for Broadway, Dances at a Gathering (1969) for City Ballet, and in 1989 a revue of his own work. Throughout, he put classical ballet technique next to jazz and character dance and pointed all of it at American city life, which is why a gang of boys in a playground can dance without looking foolish.

On film, the Prologue is where all of that lands. Bernstein's brass jabs rather than swells under the Jets, the three-note whistle runs through the score like a threat, and Irene Sharaff's faded blue and mustard against the Sharks' purple, red and black means a wide shot tells you who owns the ground before a word is spoken. Daniel L. Fapp keeps the camera low and moving with them. We have seen it many times and it still raises the hair on our arms, because Robbins has made the leap look like the obvious next thing for a boy with that much street in front of him. The film goes slack whenever the dancing stops, and the lovers' scenes need patience. How much of the slack is his and how much belongs to the people who finished the picture we cannot tell from the screen, and will not pretend to.

That last point matters. Robbins wanted extended rehearsal and repeated takes, the schedule and the money ran away from him, and he was removed from the film before it was completed. His collaborators found him hard to work for on stage as well. "Give me something to dance about and I'll dance it," he once said, and the film bears him out: where there is something to dance about, it is alive, and where there is not, it waits. He never made another. Given how this one went for everyone involved, we are not sure whether that is a loss or a mercy, but the Prologue alone is more than most directors leave behind.