• Urban grime plus vibrant primary colors and luscious pastels.
• I got reeeeally tired of the overture for West Side Story. (I didn’t mind the Oklahoma overture, which is just as long. Maybe the Oklahoma music is just more fun?) The background of hatch marks over shifting colors didn’t help; every time there was a dramatic color change I expected the movie to begin, but then nothing happened. I also wanted the marks to gradually accumulate, becoming more and more recognizable as the city skyline, but they don’t quite do that.
• The dances in West Side Story are never a suspension of the plot, they build it: the dance numbers are combat, fueling the tension, or they’re romance, slowing to let us bathe inside a feeling.
• I’m a fan of Natalie Wood, but it’s uncomfortable watching her pretend to be Puerto Rican. Some other Puerto Rican parts were played by non-Latinx whites too. It’s disheartening. Surely there were Latinx dancers around to fill more of these roles, and the idea of darkening people’s skin in order to fake (or emphasize) race is just cringeworthy, even when it’s not meant to make fun of anyone. That said, I don’t think the filmmakers were deliberately excluding anyone, the way so many other Hollywood productions did. I think they were focused on hiring great dancers, but had the mindset that painting white people brown was acceptable so there was no need to hunt harder to find Latinx dancers for all the roles. And either way the characters are shown as human beings with hopes and fears equal to those of the white characters.
And we actually get more of the emotional lives and everyday existence of the Puerto Rican characters—through the lens of Maria and Anita. Tony has a work life, but the Jets are always being Jets, and we know nothing of what their girlfriends do apart from them.
• The immigrant experience in West Side Story means dreams of opportunity confronted by closed doors, limited chances, frustration, and racist cops who hate all teens and all immigrants but hate the non-white ones the most.
• There’s prejudice everywhere in the film. When the police lieutenant breaks up the war council in the middle of the movie, he sends away the Sharks—and quickly proves he despises the Jets too, but thinks they’re on the same “side” in the larger picture. He tosses ethnic slurs and insults at the Jets, making clear he considers himself, but not them, properly American. Despite that, to him Puerto Ricans are a much greater threat, an invading menace that will take over everything if they’re not stopped. In his mind Poles and Italians and presumably other non-Anglo whites are beneath him but are still better than Puerto Ricans.
This police lieutenant’s family name is Schrank; he’s often accompanied by Officer Krupke. One might speculate that the two of them faced prejudice themselves during World War II by people accusing them of being German.
Tony’s given name is Anton. He goes by Tony . . . to assimilate.
The film has a prominent character who appears to be transgender. We don’t know for certain how this person would identify in today’s terms, but it certainly looks like what’s going on runs deeper than “I’m gonna act like a guy so I can hang out with the Jets.” This character is constantly reminded that “she” must play by the rules for females (like leaving when it’s time for “war talk”); dismissed with remarks like “Go put on a skirt!”; and told loudly, “You’re a girl!” None of this is necessary to the plot; this person’s place in the story could have easily, and more obviously, been filled by a comfortably male boy simply too young to be involved with gang business. Someone made a choice to show us identity difference.
• Early on, Anita is suspicious of Tony and doesn’t trust him—but gives him a chance for Maria’s sake. After the deaths, when she delivers the famous “A boy like that” lyrics, she sings to Maria, “Stick to your own kind!” (which is Anita’s own kind too). Even then, she is willing—with visible bitterness—to help Maria and Tony. But the near-rape in Doc’s store is too much. Even before she says it out loud, you know it: these white boys have proven everyone right about how bad they are. Their actions exemplify what Bernardo, her parents, and countless other people in her world have been telling her for years: these whites can’t be trusted, they’re brutes, they hate and despise anyone who looks like her, they will abuse her if given a shred of a chance. Now that’s all she’s going to see when she looks at them and people like them.
It hardly matters whether they meant to simply mime a rape or actually commit the act, because in that moment she could not know where they would stop. The effect on her is terrorism.
It’s a shocking scene, even from the side of the Jets. We’ve known from the first finger-snaps that these guys are tough, dangerous punks ready to fight, fully committed to intimidating people. But as a viewer I wouldn’t have believed they would violently handle Anita as they do. Verbal assault, yes, but not this. Yet at this point in the film they’ve been pushed past a limit. And she isn’t just a random Puerto Rican woman; she was Bernardo’s love, and they can’t forget what Bernardo did. Because of events they helped ignite, the Jets have turned into people who would do this.
One of the grand themes of the story is escalation.
• West Side Story is a tragedy not just of two lovers, but of two whole groups so concerned over so little, in a constant passionate struggle to cling to things that mean nothing to the rest of the world.
“Fighting over a little piece of street is so important?” asks Doc.
“To US it is!” is the answer.
“It’s all that I have,
Right or wrong,” says a song.