But, while it’s fun to imagine him uh-huh-huhing his way through ‘Something’s Coming’, Elvis couldn’t have starred in West Side Story. What would they have done about the singing? There’s no way Presley could’ve performed these arty melodramas without making it sound like he was taking the piss. And would they really have gone as far as having the hottest singing star on the planet lip-syncing to the operatic tenor of Jimmy Bryant, who provides the vocals for the guy who did get to play Tony, one Richard Beymer? It’s all a nonstarter, even within the world of pleasure provided by Elvis Presley ‘What ifs?’
So let’s stick with Richard Beymer. Even at the time, even in light of the Oscars and the millions of box office dollars, many were bemused by how poor a lead Beymer was. With his pleading eyes, weak chin, tombstone teeth, and pouty top lip, it’s like someone dumped Cliff Richard into the middle of Cabaret. So much so that West Side Story became the end of a conventional film career for Beymer, rather than a beginning.
After WSS, Beymer scored a minor success among a star-studded cast in 1962 war epic The Longest Day, before sidelining acting for a career as an activist. He decamped to Mississippi for the great civil rights voter registration drives of 1964, and directed a documentary, A Regular Bouquet: Mississippi Summer, based upon his experiences. He directed an avant-garde movie called The Inner view in 1974. And then virtually disappeared from sight until being cast in the role of Ben Horne in David Lynch’s seminal cult TV show Twin Peaks in the 1990s.
As a creepy postscript to all this, Beymer began a relationship around the time of West Side Story with a girl called Sharon Tate. He encouraged her to go into acting, a decision that ended with her violent slaughter by Charles Manson and his ‘Family’ at Roman Polanski’s Hollywood mansion in 1969. Careers adviser not a job option, then.
So . . . interesting guy, all told. But a genuine contender for a non-Academy award for Worst Actor In A Lead Role In A Movie That Turned Out Great Despite His Presence. I suspect Beymer is the major reason why a film so famous and successful doesn’t inspire the same level of acclaim and affection in the 21st century as the likes of Cabaret, Singin’ In The Rain, The Sound Of Music or Grease. You just can’t get past the guy.
But I really do adore West Side Story. And my love remains true purely because of three of its musical set-pieces, two of which prominently feature Beymer. Don’t get me wrong: I love the gritty (for a musical) New York locations and lurid colours, and the way Wise (despite his co-director credit, Robbins, the WSS stage director who was essentially there to choreograph the dance sequences, was fired during the production) makes squalor look so beautiful. I love the toe-tappin’, finger-snappin’ presentation of the violence and posing of young working-class men. I love Wood and Moreno and Tamblyn. I love the bizarrely gymnastic way Tamblyn – as Jets leader Riff – dismounts from a high rail early in the movie; a death-defying move that would now form the entire centre-piece of some amateur film on YouTube, here dispensed with in a couple of seconds. And I especially love the ingenious basis of the whole enterprise, courtesy of Bernstein, Sondheim and Arthur Laurents’s original 1957 stage musical . . . Shakespeare’s saga of warring families the Montagues and Capulets recast in the image of teen gangs the Puerto Rican Sharks and the Caucasian Jets indulging in America’s favourite pastime: race war.
But it’s West Side Story’s three best songs that have taken up permanent residence in my psyche and which, for me anyways, represent the high watermark of non-rock-based American Song.
The first is ‘Maria’. This is, visuals-wise, a Beymer solo. But I don’t care that he’s rubbish because it’s all about the song; a melody so romantic that it entirely defines that unforgettable moment when one is first smitten by someone, usually some time in your teens. You remember: time stood still, your heart pounded and your stomach and legs did things you that you couldn’t understand, invisible birds chirp merrily and all that talk of paradise and heaven which you’d just learned to be cynical about suddenly made perfect sense because you realised that it had nothing to do with God. An orchestra swirls in your ears and it’s definitely a waltz, but one where the rhythm is replaced by the rush of your own blood.
If you don’t recall, ‘Maria’ – original cast recording, sung by Jimmy Bryant – will bring it all flooding back. Make you sad that love and lust can never feel that new and shocking again. Make you happy that someone or something designed human beings to feel it at all. Make you remember that the pain of everything that happened at the time made you feel as alive as the pleasure, if you were lucky enough to get any, particularly the part where loud music backdrops the line, ‘Say it loud and there’s music playing’, and then soft music frames the whisper, ‘Say it soft and it’s almost like praying.’
And then there’s the raucous satire that is ‘America’. After Maria’s (Wood) patrician Big Brother Bernardo forbids her to see Tony, as earthy heroine Anita (future Oz star Rita Moreno), turns feminista. ‘Girls here are free to have fun. She is in America now!’ But Bernardo has the anti-multicultural answer to that. ‘Puerto Rico is in America now.’ The scene and the following song and dance are played for laughs, but sometimes one needs to sugar the bitter pill. ‘America’ and its surrounding dialogue hits the nails of economic migration and the gap between the realities and fantasies of integration squarely on the head. And the song, from its mutant Latin sound and the cartoonish joy of the Hispanic accents, through to the cruel irony of Sondheim’s lyrics, still stands as the truest, funniest art statement on the lie of The American Dream, while its ebullience says something significant about the genuine freedom that America does offer. Its good-natured anger defines the coming civil rights crusades as perfectly as Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’, the cultural miscegenation of rock ’n’ roll and the speeches of Martin Luther King. It is ten minutes of pure pleasure which gives anyone a crash course on the conflict between the liberal desire to assimilate and the conservative qualities of cleaving to one’s own culture, and then punches the point home that none of this is about race. It’s about class. It’s about money. It’s always about money.
And finally . . . possibly my favourite song in the world, and a song very powerfully connected to the previous couple of masterpieces. A duet that comes very close to illuminating the core element of The Human Condition. A melody so beautiful I can’t listen to it, not even in company and when I’m feeling at my most butch and stoic, without gushing tears like a likkle girlie girl who has just watched Justin Bieber, her teddy bear and a kennelful of puppies being run over by a tank. It is called ‘Somewhere’, and . . . and . . . sorry . . . wait a minute . . . No, I’m fine, just something in my eye . . .
That’s better. Where was I? Oh yeah, possibly the greatest song ever written, and I say that in an entry that mentions ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ so don’t you dare write this off as hyperbole. ‘Somewhere’ is about a vision of heaven. Of peace of mind, and escaping the traps that most of us live in, again, largely due to money. It’s about hope, and our extraordinary ability to keep looking at the stars, even when the gutter is about to engulf us. It is astonishingly short here, which only goes to show how little time you need to transcend, when you have the right means at your disposal. There’s a fantastic cover version by Tom Waits on his Blue Valentine album, which, by way of his rusty drain of a voice, makes the point that it’s not just the young who need hope and poetry to carry on living.
So, there you go. West Side Story is one of those pieces of art that does make you feel somewhat in awe of what human beings can achieve, so deftly does it shuffle complex themes and then find the ideal pictures and music to bring them home. But I think this lofty excellence might be the other reason why WSS is not loved like, say, Grease, which is, in comparison, a tacky piece of am dram.
There’s this gag in Seth McFarlane’s scabrous cartoon show Family Guy – bear with me – where the Griffin family are locked in a panic room and are forced to make conversation. They find themselves talking about
films, and The Godfather in particular. Peter Griffin doesn’t like Coppola’s masterwork because, he says, ‘It insists upon itself.’
West Side Story insists upon itself. It knows just how clever and classy it is. And that’s why it’s 145 minutes long instead of a comfortable 90, and why, though it’s an easy film to respect, it’s a hard film to love. You can’t imagine anyone turning up to a late-night screening in Jets or Sharks gear, or getting the girls round to watch it and laugh and bond nostalgically. It has a superior air, an arrogant distance from its audience that is only closed when the best songs swell and make you swoon.
Which is also why, when I’ve talked to various friends about this book, and they’ve started to reel off a list of what they feel are quintessential teen movies, not one person has mentioned West Side Story. It’s an extraordinary film, and deserves its place here. But it’s not an extraordinary film about teenagers. It isn’t really interested in them, except as ciphers on which to project an intellectual-philosophical Big Statement about class, race, young love, Shakespeare, jazz and the true meaning of America. Maybe Elvis would have mocked the enterprise enough to prick some of the pretensions and make West Side Story less admirable, and more lovable.
THE YOUNG SAVAGES
1961
Starring: Burt Lancaster, Shelley Winters, Telly Savalas, Stanley Kristien, John Davis Chandler
Dir.: John Frankenheimer
Plot: Former trapeze artist provides safety net for crazy, mixed-up kids.
Key line: ‘He was 15 or 16 years old. And I was trying with all my heart to kill him.’
Savages, ’cos, you know, it’s a jungle out there. Out There being 1961 Spanish Harlem (just Harlem in the film, but there is nary a black person to be seen). Instead, three Italian-American teen hoodlums race through the streets to a dissonant jazz soundtrack. We know they’re hoodlums because they wear leather, kick over a child’s doll’s pram and don’t stop to pick up their five-a-day from the fruit market. They almost knock over a little girl too, but the camera has no time to stop and take this in, being busy, busy, busy following the boys’ date with destiny – to the stoop of Puerto Rican teen Roberto Escalante. There is a rush and a push, knives are pulled and the camera falls back to show us what those gangland jazz riffs were telling us all along – somebody’s going to get their head kicked in tonight. Roberto dies in front of his sister Louisa (played by Pilar Suerat).
Can’t stop to mourn though, because that camera’s getting busy again, following the boys’ attempted escape through building sites, dodging wrecking balls where the old world is being demolished to make room for a New World Order of youth gangs and tribal divisions. Director John Frankenheimer, maybe best known for bonkers masterpiece The Manchurian Candidate, lets his camera run wild in every imaginable way – views from above, low-screen angles including a child’s-eye view, deep focus a go-go, a rotational view that beckons the main character through a door and then swivels to follow him up a flight of stairs. Oh . . . and Steadicam-type shots apparently from the vantage point of the Coney Island rollercoaster. Throughout the film, this camera ain’t playing second fiddle to no puny story.
Back to Harlem. Picked up by the fuzz, the boys soon find themselves in a police station being questioned by Burt Lancaster, helped by chronically smirking cop Telly Savalas, who, before he gets a full Telly Savalas like his real-life niece Jennifer Aniston in The Break-Up, makes do with two fashion-forward Brazilians over his ears.
The boys are members of the Italian-American Thunderbirds gang: Arthur Reardon, the brains of the outfit, who wants to be a psycho when he grows up (played by John Davis Chandler); Anthony Aposto, nicknamed Batman and intellectually ‘backward’ (Neil Nephew); and Danny DiPace (Stanley Kristien).
Burt is the assistant District Attorney Hank Bell, his anglicised name tolling the death knell of his immigrant identity and birth name Bellini. For Burt is Italian, he’s from the streets, and it turns out he also knows one of the boys, DiPace – he used to date DiPace’s mother Mary, played by perennial Queen Victim in the gender- and class-war films of the ’50s and ’60s, Shelley Winters.
But that was back in the day, and Burt has now set his sights a bit higher. He’s married to Karin (Merrill) who could not be more WASP if her girdle was black-and-yellow striped. They live in a modern apartment block, and have a perky 14-year-old daughter Jenny. But Burt’s not home as often as he might be, and Jenny’s growing up. She wears a bra, and Burt’s not noticed she needs one (though that’s probably a good thing for a father not to notice, or is that just me?). She’s also dating a boy called Lonnie. ‘I thought it was Greg,’ says Burt to his missus, who confirms it used to be. ‘Did I ever meet Lonnie?’ ‘You didn’t meet Greg,’ snaps Mrs Wasp. Could it be that Burt is – gasp – a Bad Dad himself? Could Jenny be heading for a troubled life and tragedy on the stoop? No, because luckily they don’t have a stoop, they have an elevator. Burt’s got out of the ghetto, remember?
Burt interviews the boys, Reardon and Batman Aposto in jail, Danny in juvie as he’s only 15. Reardon is the ringleader, absolutely without remorse. Batman is . . . well, he’s variously described as retarded, stupid, insane – terms apparently interchangeable in this film. To illustrate this, Reardon has him bang his head on the jail wall, which Batman does without hesitation. You get the feeling he’s maybe the teensiest bit suggestible. Meanwhile, Danny says he don’t need no stinking help, not from his mum and not from proxy-dad Burt neither.
The three boys are claiming self-defence, saying that Roberto pulled a knife first, apparently witnessed by a neighbourhood girl. But Burt’s investigation finds that Roberto was blind (just like justice herself, in one of the clunkier juxtapositions), and that shiny knife the girl saw glinting in the sun was a harmonica. Did the T-Birds commit the premeditated murder of a blind defenceless harmonica player, just because he’s a member of the rival Puerto Rican gang The Horsemen? Burt thinks so, and if they’re guilty, that’s Murder One and a one-way trip to the plug-in deterrent of the electric chair. You don’t kill Stevie Wonder on Burt’s watch and get away with it.
Who’s going to argue? Not Burt’s boss, being mentioned as a possible state governor, because nothing spells votes in an American election like the possibility of executing juvenile delinquents. Not the boys themselves, with their misguided view of manhood. Not Roberto’s mourning-clad mother, looking like an Old Country fury from a Universal ’30s horror film, and charging Burt with exacting revenge on her son’s murderers – she wants an eye for an eye for her dead, blind son.
But there’s another mother involved. Two actually. First, Mrs Wasp gets drunk at the boss’s fundraiser for his election campaign, and expresses some liberal doubts about murdering teenagers for votes. After all, this is a gubernatorial race in New York, not a presidential election in Texas. Cue some more cinematricks and distracting camera-work, as Burt and the missus glower at each other front-of-frame, while there’s some deep-focus speechifying in the background. (Interestingly she doesn’t recant these views, even when threatened by The Horseman herself. If this was a less liberal movie, she’d have had a day-long recant-athon, taking breaks every hour to admit that hubby always knows best and ladies is rubbish.)
The second mother is Shelley Winters/Mary DiPace, Burt’s ex (kind of hard to believe in the film, but, as we’ll see below, truth may have been stranger than fiction). She doesn’t want her boy to fry – she believes he may be good-bad, but not evil. After all, he saved a young Puerto Rican from being drowned by his fellow gang members. Despite Danny’s absent father (Mary found out on the wedding night that said father was a Petty Racketeer, and now he’s gone, either to the big racket in the sky, or maybe prison, or maybe spraying racketeer seed elsewhere in Harlem, it’s not important, he’s just absent, OK?), Mary’s loved him and tried to bring him up well. But they don’t have an elevator, so the siren call of the streets has proved too strong.
It all ends, as it has to, in a sweaty, hysterical court room. There�
��s a bit of business around who wielded which knife, Louisa the murdered boy’s sister reveals her own Mommy-implicating secret, and Burt’s boss starts to realise he can’t count on executing ethnic and mentally disabled children for political gain. Trainee psycho Reardon goes gloriously nutazoid and is gagged . . . but there are no super-injunctions here, this is an actual hanky gagging his mouth. Ah, the literal ’60s. Danny comes back into the family fold and accepts some proxy-dad advice – ‘Tears are for men too.’
The boys are found guilty, but today nobody dies. There’s no way back to society for Reardon, who gets 20-to-life in the big house. But there’s a nice padded therapeutic Batcave waiting for insane/stupid/retarded Aposto, and Shelley’s boy Danny, who did no actual stabbing, gets a year in juvie for rehabilitation. Judging by Shelley’s relieved reaction, you’d think his sentence was being sent to bed with no dinner. But then she hasn’t seen The Wire and doesn’t know that a year in juvenile custody, while on paper better than the chair, will inevitably make your nice son a sociopathic badass.
A Hollywood ending? Well, yes, but there’s a scene in court that jolts and jars you just as you’re dropping off to liberal certainty. And it’s that nosy hyperactive camera to blame, for once not moving, just looking. Shelley’s in the courtroom of course, but she’s not the mother that counts today. In an astonishing shot, Mrs Wasp and Jenny, in all their fragrant Nordic Western middle-class prettiness and pastel clothes, are sitting directly in front of Roberto’s mother and sister. Ostensibly from Puerto Rico, these women, still in almost niqab-like mourning, stare unmoving like Mittel European agents of vengeance. Whatever happens in that courtroom, this class/race war shit ain’t over.
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