West Side Story [Collector's Set, Special Edition]

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"West Side Story" won everything in sight when it was released in 1961, including Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director (Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins), Best Supporting Actor (George Chakiris), Best Supporting Actress (Rita Moreno), Best Cinematography, Best Costumes, Best Art Direction, Best Sound, Best Scoring, Best Film Editing, and even a special award for Robbins' brilliant choreography. Based on Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" and updated to the 1950s, this Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim collaboration remains one of the most creative and energetic Broadway shows ever produced.

But one's reaction to it today may depend upon just how much one likes musicals. After all, minor aberrations like "Moulin Rouge" and "Chicago" notwithstanding, the musical genre has fallen out of favor in Hollywood lately, and younger audiences might not understand or appreciate why two groups of teenage hoodlums are continually breaking out into song and dance. Nevertheless, for those who enjoy such things "West Side Story" remains among the best of Hollywood's Broadway translations, and MGM's newest two-disc Special Edition DVD set does a fine job reproducing its sound and picture, while providing the necessary bonus materials to justify its asking price.

As in the Bard's play, "West Side Story" opens with the introduction of two rival, New York City street gangs--the youthful, white Sharks and their Puerto Rican counterparts, the Jets--as they swagger and jeer and face off at one another. Before long they break out into open hostility until the police break them up. These opening dance sequences have a poetic, balletic grace about them that is purposely at odds with the coarse postures of the participants.

"West Side Story" was a production the like of which Broadway (and Hollywood) had never seen before. It wasn't in the tradition of the usual musical; this one was a romantic tragedy with an emphasis on realism, prejudice, and bloodshed, using actual location shots. Folks expecting a typically lighthearted musical-comedy were in for a shock.

Then we meet the principals. Richard Beymer stars as Tony, a Jet who doesn't want trouble, and Natalie Wood as Maria, the sister of the leader of the Sharks. Naturally, Tony and Maria fall in love at a neighborhood dance, and the major conflict is underway. Oddly, I've never found Beymer or Wood especially notable in their parts. Beymer is somewhat stiff in his role, and Wood never quite persuades us to believe she's a young Puerto Rican woman, despite the work she did on her accent. Like the rest of the actors and dancers in the cast, their singing voices are dubbed (Wood's voice by Marni Nixon, who made a career of such things). However, no matter how you feel about the leads, the co-stars are brilliant. George Chakiris as Bernardo, head of the Sharks, and Rita Moreno as Anita, Maria's friend, deserved their Supporting Oscars. They bring an exhilarating level of energy to the proceedings.

If you know the Shakespeare play, part of the fun in watching the film is noting how the screenwriter, Ernest Lehman, transforms each of the playwright's famous scenes into modern dress. New York City fills in for Verona, Italy, for instance, and a police lieutenant steps in for the Prince who is fed up with the feuding factions.

Anyway, it's the singing and dancing that are, in the end, the main items. Frankly, I'm not really keen on dancing myself, and it continues to make me a little uncomfortable watching the first ten or fifteen minutes of the movie as a group of supposedly tough juvenile delinquents prance, frolic, and strut their stuff through the streets of New York. But it's stylistically fascinating, especially the "Cool" number; and in any case, if you're not up to the dancing, there's always the wonderful Bernstein music and Sondheim lyrics. Some of the most popular numbers are the "Jet Song," "Something's Coming," "America," "Gee, Officer Krupke," "I Feel Pretty," "Somewhere," "A Boy Like That/I Have A Love," and, of course, the showstopping tunes, "Maria" and "Tonight." I think I've heard them about a hundred times, and they're just as appealing as ever.

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