West Side Story 4K 2021

Oh, these anniversaries! Steven Spielberg celebrated the 50th anniversary of his film career (starting with the brilliant Duel in 1971) with his debut in a new genre, the musical. Bernstein-Sondheim's West Side Story had already been triumphantly adapted, exactly 60 years earlier, and won ten (!) Oscars. The more interesting challenge, the famous director must have decided, and brought back one of the stars of the previous version, Rita Moreno, to the cast.

WHAT'S THE REVIEW. "Romeo and Juliet" in a New York setting: he, Tony, shifts cans in a grocery store and she, Maria, mops floors in an expensive department store. Instead of the noble Veronese families, there are two youth gangs, the pale-faced "Rockets" and the Latino "Sharks. Both of them, to be sure, are of the "limit" (what most of them do is unclear), but they think they're entitled, at least to a piece of urban land in western Manhattan. Symbolically, the winner will get nothing - the neighborhood is already destined for bourgeois development.

WHAT I LIKED. Any well-executed musical can be sung and danced even better. Spielberg takes the action outdoors: the light-and-drive intro, the confrontation between two brawling gangs and the girlish America, filmed, it seems, right in the city streets (60 years ago, such a scale was unthinkable). Also the memorable pavilion scenes, the gym dancing night and the hooligan banter at the police station (Gee, Officer Krupke), are staged at the highest level. The actors here sing in their own voices (almost everyone was dubbed in 1961), and the choreography by Jerome Robbins is modernized, as they say, with respect for the classics. The latter is more likely to be appreciated, though, by connoisseurs, but anyone will admire Janusz Kaminski's camera: the general overhead shots framing the melee scene are breathtaking.

WHAT I LIKED LESS. The plot roughnesses resist a coherent dramaturgy: the feeling of the "ex" (who has done time) Anton for the swarthy Puerto Rican girl is excessively hot (I will love you forever!), and the night of love immediately after the murder of her brother cuts the eye (but these complaints are more to our William, Shakespeare). The New York lovers, once together, become predictable and luscious in the blink of an eye, and even drenched in ethereal glow during their dates - their surroundings don't look much livelier or more entertaining. Rita Moreno is too much, while the other protagonists-61 (who are quite alive), alas, do not appear at all.