Overture and Scherzo Ballet
20th Century Fox… I mean, MGM has created a new 70mm print of Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins‘ West Side Story (’61), and Fox Home Video will issue a Bluray, I’m told, sometime later this year. The 70mm print will screen it this Sunday at 7pm at the American Cinematheque under the aegis of TCM’s Classic Film Festival.
The 1961 consensus, of course, was that West Side Story lacked the snap and vitality of the 1957 Broadway play, and that the play was an exuberantly jacked-up theatrical impression of street conditions among upper-west-side Manhattan’s poor whites and Puerto Ricans in the early ’50s. So the film was twice removed to begin with, and by today’s standards it seems almost satirically inauthentic.
But the overture really works emotionally, and so does the helicopter footage over Manhattan that precedes the opening Jets-vs-Sharks dance number (which was shot not far from where Lincoln Center stands today). The overture, really, is the whole ball game. I can watch this section and the scherzo and ballet sequence over and over. But the rest of it? Richard Beymer and Russ Tamblyn and those freshly painted bright-red tenement walls and Natalie Wood wearing brown Puerto Rican makeup? Later.
I’m one of the few people I know who would love it if movies included overtures once again…
Not to snipe, but MGM did the restoration work on this one over the last two years.(Yes, they do actually still exist.) Fox will release the Blu-Ray in October. And it looks/sounds AMAZING.
Rita Moreno? How autentico do you want it?
This film did not age well. Easily the most overrated musical of all time. The best thing to come out of it was this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOgL-Z3byh8
The music is so beautiful. Whatever limitations of the screen adaptation, I love this musical.
The ‘America’ number is great. So is Jerome Robbins’ choreography. Its biggest crime is the two bland leads.
Judgment at Nuremberg was robbed
“West Side Story” has always been the “off the top of my head” answer when I’m asked what my favorite film is, because, to me, it has all the individual elements I enjoy in a film… music/dance, comedy, drama, romance, social satire (“Gee, Officer Krupke”)… rolled up into one.
Yet my favorite musical is “Into The Woods”. Go figure.
Jeff, you’ve baffled me on this one.
“The 1961 consensus, of course, was that West Side Story lacked the snap and vitality of the 1957 Broadway play.”
11 Oscars including best picture.
New York Film Critics Best Picture
Grammy best soundtrack
WGA best screenplay
Three Golden Globes including best picture
Currently at 92 on Rotten Tomatoes
AFI 100 greatest films of all time
Imagine how well it would have done had it contained the snap and vitality of the play!
Gaydos FTW.
If an alien species requested one piece of art to encapsulate humanity, a 70MM print of WSS would be on the short list along with Simon’s Graceland, Klimt’s Beethovenfries, and Emmerich’s Independence Day (just so they wouldn’t get any ideas).
Zach: I was actually gonna bring up that spoof, ‘cus I was looking for it. But still, if I had a dollar for everyone who brought up that “pretty, witty and gay” line… Ok, folks, we get that they didn’t realize audiences would be laughing at that scene 50 years later. Move on, already.
A masterpiece.
No two ways about it.
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alien species requested one piece of art to encapsulate humanity, a 70MM print of WSS would be on the short list along with Simon’s Graceland, Klimt’s Beethovenfries
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