Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 121

West Side Story and Kennedy’s Camelot

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you see what you want to see. You see what you light.”8 The result was a musical
noir crime film. In “Musical Advance: The ‘West Side Story’ Expands on Screen,”
Bosley Crowther of The New York Times noted, “Always there is the palpable frame
of a concrete and crushing reality enclosing the action on the screen...kids kill one
another in a violent ‘rumble’” which foregrounds “mutual hatreds and distrusts of
their respective ethnic groups.” As in Romeo and Juliet, the end is “ironic and
tragic,” a “piercing and haunting demonstration of social folly and human waste.”
Crowther argues that West Side Story “does something more than entertain and
provide an emotional catharsis.” It makes a “conspicuous advancement of
sophistication through the musical film and opens the door to wider expression of
more serious and mature themes in this genre.” This “drama” of a New York “juvenile
gang feud could not be classed as a musical comedy.” It was much too violent and
poignant,” employing “stinging humor” that was “essentially tragic in mood.” He
calls it “drama, dance and music” whose “buildings” and “street sounds” are as
“harsh” as On the Waterfront. A gang of tough kids lounge in a playground like
young panthers in a wire-fenced cage. The effect is...a starkly realistic crime film.”9
West Side Story achieves this by activating dark cinematic conventions and
cynical thematics of film noir into a moody formal style of low-key, high contrast,
chiaroscuro lighting and visual design (versus bright, thematically upbeat “flat”
high-key musicals). This noir style conveys an oppressive, claustrophobic
environment— dark, cavernous interiors, urban exteriors at night, alleys, concrete
freeway underpasses, shadowy bedrooms, basements, and the long cramped
confines of the after-hours candy store. This bleak setting is a subjective realm in
film noir, visually manifested in the definitive milieu of the American city at night:
obscured by darkness, shrouded in fog and smoke, rendered strikingly oppressive
through splintering, oblique patterns of menacing shadows and stark, piercing light
which glistens in the reflection of rain slicked streets, pools of water, shattered
windows and mirrored surfaces. Robert Wise was a veteran noir thriller director
and proponent of “hard-hitting realism” style at RKO who had never worked on a
musical before (Archer, 15 October 1961). Wise edited Citizen Kane (1941) and
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) for Orson Welles before directing Curse o f the
Cat People (1944) in Val Lewton’s psychological “B” horror unit, then noir films
Born to Kill (1947), The Set-Up (1949) and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) when
the PCA allowed interracial couples after Giant (1955). Wise’s experience with
grim realistic backgrounds influenced West Side Story's noir stylization from actual
city streets to later studio scenes. Manifesting a postwar-early 1960s culture in
shift, the urban terrain of the film’s location was changing. According to production
records in the Robert Wise Collection, the film’s crew had to beg and bribe a
wrecking company to delay demolition of the older buildings where the opening
location (dance) sequence was shot so they could utilize its grittily “realistic”