Film

What's on at the cinema plus reviews of the latest movie and DVD releases

Updates:

West Side Story (1961)

Director: Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins

Average user rating

1 review

Movie review

From Time Out London

Time to click your fingers, dig out your best denim and act like a tough guy on street corners. No, it’s not a New Kids on the Block reunion but a rerelease of ‘West Side Story’. So how does the film – which won ten Oscars on its 1961 release – stand up now? Very well indeed. Old-fashioned song-and-dance routines set to Leonard Bernstein’s music apart, there’s something thoroughly modern about the whole affair – a mood set by the gliding opening aerial shots of New York City that embrace key landmarks before finding the mean streets, moody subway lines and dingy bars of Lower Manhattan. There’s a turf war going on down there, a battle between the all-American Jets, led by Riff (Russ Tamblyn), and the Sharks, a local band of Puerto Ricans (played largely by made-up white boys). The core of the story is a loose update of the classic ‘Romeo and Juliet’ tangle, with Jet Tony (Richard Beymer) and Shark chick Maria (a stunning Natalie Wood) falling head over heels and sparking fireworks between their respective camps.Largely it’s simple, rousing stuff, but the debate among the Puerto Ricans about the attraction and repulsion of the American dream, as caught in the song ‘America’, remains current. The film divides opinion by sex: the forward-looking girls see the potential benefits (‘industry boom in America!’) while the nostalgic boys resent their new home’s hardships (‘12 in a room in America!’). There’s also a still-relevant, cheeky dig at social theory in the hoodlums’ chirping ‘naturally we’re punks’ and ‘this boy don’t need a judge, he needs an analyst’s care’. These days, we’d slap an ASBO on the lot of them.

Author: DC 2005-08-23 12:15:28

Time Out London Issue 1827: August 24-31 2005