"West Side Story" and 1950s America

When West Side Story opened in motion picture theatres in the autumn of 1961, the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther hailed it as a cinema masterpiece that used "the freer and less restricted medium of the mobile photograph" on the big screen to give "range and natural aspect" to the story's juvenile-gang-war theme (Crowther 351). That theme had made its theatrical debut in a Broadway musical staged by Jerome Robbins, who choreographed (and codirected, with Robert Wise) the film. Crowther called for a thoughtful, sympathetic response to the tragedy "in the staggering sense of wastage of the energies of kids" (352). West Side Story was not, however, universally praised by the critics. Kael's evaluation of the "widely admired opening shots of New York" is that they lend sociological importance to the film but do not conceal the "mawkish" love story between Maria and Tony. Nevertheless, the movie won the Oscar for Best Picture.

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Jets witness the embrace of Puerto Rican girl and American boy, as well as the boy's murder, obliges everyone to admit what a waste the rivalry is and shames everyone into behaving decently. When evaluating whether the film's depiction of ethnic groups, stereotypes, and racial bigotry was a mirror up to the time, one must remember that West Side Story's main source material is not a sociological or anthropological ethnography of depraved-on-account-a-they're-deprived working-class constituencies but instead Romeo and Juliet, a romantic tragedy. Shakespeare's strong narrative line both survives and supports the success of its transplantation to a modern setting, and it is the success of that narrative against which the details of the mise-en-scène are to be most appropriately evaluated. When one knows that the original notion of adapting Romeo and Juliet to a modern urban setting for the Broadway stage was a musical play titled East Side Story, chronicling the star-crossed romance of a Jewish girl and Catholic boy living on Manhattan's lower east side, and that this idea was discarded as too dated given the social realities of 1950s Manhattan (Keats 104), then it is possible to consider the backstory of racial tension as a sociolo
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Approximate Word count = 2717
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)