Attached are the 1961 version and Steven Spielberg’s remake of fully six decades later, and while both are excellent, it’s the latter that I’m singling out here as probably the best piece of song and dance choreography ever filmed, superior even to the original, and possibly even to Gene Kelly’s magnificent turn in Singin’ in the Rain, supposing that’s possible. Striving to fully reimagine the set pieces that made the first theatrical release legendary, Spielberg decided to forgo sets and sound stages and film almost entirely on location in the tenements and streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan, a decision that vastly increased the complexity and expense, but paid off in spades, lending this number in particular a sense of relentless forward motion as the dancers, captured in a series of long tracking shots, constantly change locale, weaving in and out of buildings, up and down stairs, and back and forth through the city streets, literally running down the middle of the road before finally commandeering an intersection, all of it filmed on a day so scorchingly hot that the asphalt was growing soft and the bottoms of the dancers’ shoes began literally to melt.
The sheer energy of the performance is astounding, and the entire cast is magnificent, but you barely notice as Ariana DeBose, amply filling Rita Mareno’s very big shoes in the role of Anita, utterly dominates the screen. Wearing what’s undoubtedly the most magnificent yellow dress in the history of cinema, she moves with lithe, athletic, graceful abandon, radiating an almost impossible level of energy and charisma as she chews through the meticulously staged period scenery with captivating authority. The camera loves, loves, loves her, while the expert framing, dramatic perspectives, and typically clever staging combine with the carefully crafted mise-en-scène to remind the viewer that this is Spielberg’s camera, wielded as ever with a master’s command of the filmmaker’s art to enhance the innate excitement of the choreography (which deviates significantly from the original). Notice, in the beginning, how in effect he draws and closes the theatre curtains sequentially in front of the singers, using the fabric hanging from moving clotheslines, or how, mid-number, the women charge into a gym and wheel on the men, line abreast, just as some poor sap is getting his lights punched out in the boxing ring in the background, as if taking one of the hard knocks that the men claim is what life in America is really all about. Take in all the little touches, like the lily-white beat cops down the block making their menacing presence known when the ladies first exit to the street, or the huge promotional billboard for what would then have been the “apartment complex of tomorrow”, ultra-modern and essentially off limits to the characters on screen, drearily old school to us. I love how, at the finale, the street’s packed with the sort of huge, chrome-encrusted, V-8 Detroit land yachts that would have symbolized everything the protagonists hoped to one day achieve for themselves, and the perfect late-1950s costuming of the well-heeled women in the cars, right down to their cats-eye sunglasses.
It doesn’t hurt, of course, that this is one of the greatest compositions ever written for the Broadway stage, with Stephen Sondheim’s snappy and characteristically clever lyrics matching perfectly the cadence of Bernstein’s quintessentially Latin American score as it continually changes key and even switches time signature, transitioning from 4/4 early to 6/8 as the piece progresses. It’s all so intoxicatingly upbeat and exotically rhythmic that the listener might just groove to the music and miss what it’s really about; when it was written, in 1957, America provided a trenchant and really quite risky critique of the yawning chasm between the shiny, brightly-hued promises of the American Dream, and the dismal, monochrome reality of the experience actually delivered to people of colour (plus ça change…). Sondheim tweaked the words over the years as the musical moved from stage to screen, but in every version Anita and the women sing about all that’s wonderful and hopeful about their new home, while Bernardo, played here with considerable verve by David Alvarez, and the rest of the boys respond with contrapuntal assertions of just how badly everything nevertheless sucks for them and theirs. This is from the 2021 iteration:
[ANITA/LUZ/ROSALÍA]
I like to be in America
[ANITA/LUZ/ROSALÍA/ILLI/CONCHI/MONTSE]
Okay by me in America
[ANITA & ALL WOMEN]
Everything free in America
[BERNARDO]
For a small fee in America
[ANITA]
Buying on credit is so nice
[BERNARDO]
One look at us and they charge twice
[ROSALÍA]
I have my own washing machine
[BERNARDO]
What do you have though to keep clean?
[ANITA & WOMEN]
Skyscrapers bloom in America
Cadillacs zoom in America
Industry boom in America
[THE SHARKS]
Twelve in a room in America
[ANITA]
Lots of new housing with more space
[COMMUNITY ACTIVISTS]
Lots of doors slamming in our face!
[ANITA]
I’ll get a terrace apartment
[BERNARDO]
Better get rid of your accent
[ANITA/ROSALÍA/LUZ]
Life can be bright in America
[BERNARDO/BRAULIO/QUIQUE]
If you can fight in America
[ANITA/ROSALÍA/LUZ]
Life is alright in America
[BERNARDO & THE SHARKS]
If you’re all white in America
I’ve always imagined that the music drew inspiration from Aaron Copland’s El Salón México, a work with which Bernstein was intimately familiar, having conducted it many times with the New York Philharmonic. Have a listen as here, Bernstein himself introduces Copland to conduct:
This latest version of West Side Story may be the greatest musical ever set to film, but 2021, a peak year of the COVID 19 pandemic, was an inauspicious time for its release, and it made less than 80 million dollars, not a lot these days for a major theatrical release (and a lot less than it cost to make and promote it). Nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Costuming, Best Sound, and Best Production Design, it brought home only a single Oscar, a thoroughly deserved Best Supporting Actress for Ariana DeBose. If it had been up to me, they’d have given another one specifically to that amazing yellow dress.
the needlefish 