Wests Sides Stories

We watched the Wise/Robbins WEST SIDE STORY and the Spielberg together in one day, to see which is better — neither of us, disgracefully, had actually watched the original properly.

Verdict up front: the original is the better film, but the remake doesn’t disgrace it, and you can argue that it has a good reason to exist. It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like for Rita Moreno to act surrounded by white folks in shoe polish the first time. And Rachel Zegler is so adorable in the new one, it makes you think, There was a 1961 version of her out there, somewhere, who should have played that role but never had a shot at it.

On the other (west) hand… the play and the first film had an impeccably simple idea — Romeo and Juliet updated to NOW. Spielberg’s film has a weird idea — Romeo and Juliet updated to 1957. So he has to recreate, physically or digitally, all that stuff that was just THERE for Wise & co. And instead of making the story newly relevant to a contemporary audience, he’s SORT OF doing that, and sort of doing nostalgia? This slight confusion probably has more to do with the film’s failure to find a large theatrical audience than any issue of quality — it’s an enjoyable watch, probably more so if you haven’t been exposed to the original.

We definitely set Spielberg a difficult job, because the opening ten minutes + of the ’61 WSS are absolutely stunning. Impossible to top. Quite Spielbergian, in a way: high impact visual storytelling. A whole series of dramatic reveals done with the camera.

The bird’s-eye views of New York must have been staggeringly new at the time, but they’re still stunning, thanks to the sound/picture combo — whistling echoes from the shaded concrete canyons, impossibly clear and impossibly isolated from other city noise, but creating a thrilling sense of scale and mystery.

The film’s ONE zoom shot crashes in from a high angle and we IMMEDIATELY cut to a tight profile on Russ Tamblyn (the film’s real star — well, Mercutio is the most fun, or should be) and a series of jagged cuts that yank us back and make room for his finger-clicking cohort. The spatial jumps are so short it’s impressive that they work at all, without feeling ugly. It’s important to realise that Wise was an editor (KANE) and this is an editor’s film. Its best effects are all dependent on cutting.

But also framing, movement, and colour. Jerome Robbins may not fully deserve his co-director credit, except that the choreography is so crucial a part of the film that, yeah, he kind of does.

The opening is so good — a series of totally pre-planned in-frame DISCOVERIES, each one dazzling and exciting — that the rest of the film has a hard time living up to it. It’s very good, but only intermittently as EXTRAORDINARY as its start.

Spielberg starts with an aerial view also — if Wise’s film is a cutting film, Spielberg’s is all about crane shots. We’re closer to the ground — the echoing whistle is SUBTERRANEAN — and we’re looking at the ruined skeletons of fire escapes, a nice idea. Slum clearance — the Lincoln Center will rise here. Opening and closing the film in this locale (how much, if any, of this scenery is real?) is a neat idea — especially the ending. It feels post-apocalyptic by night, and it’s a shame Tony Kushner’s script has less talk of war.

I guess Spielberg HAD to change everything here — simply reproducing all the 1961 film’s choices would hardly have been respectable. But it inevitably means everything is either not quite as good or not nearly as good. Still good, I’d say. Just not at the sublime level of Version 0.1.

Even Wise can’t follow himself, so that as the films progress, Spielberg does gain ground. And I don’t fully understand the widespread negative reaction to Ansel Elgort. He’s not as pretty as Richard Beymer, it’s true, and maybe that’s mainly what we want from the part. But I found him in every other respect just as good. If the negative reaction was due to his alleged sexual misconduct, that’s entirely understandable, I too would rather Tony not be played by an alleged sex offender, but that’s not what people were saying was their reason.

The new movie is guilty of a heck of a lot of OPENING OUT, which should probably be a criminal offence. Hitchcock’s “do the play” approach may not be universally correct, but there are so many unintended consequences set off when you faithfully do a scene that was written to take place somewhere else. When “Gee, Officer Krupke” is relocated to a police station, Kushner has to contrive a situation where the kids can be alone to perform it, then has to contrive a situation where they all get released, and both solutions feel… contrived.

I’m prepared to admit that giving “Cool” to Elgort’s Tony actually makes the song more useful to the narrative — though it’s the original, with its fast low angle trackback, that made Fiona gasp.

But moving “I’m so Pretty” to late in the movie, after the deaths of two major characters, is a blunder. The song just washed over us, signifying nothing — our minds were literally elsewhere, on the drama now surging towards a climax while Maria is blissfully unaware. On paper that could be poignant. But the song wasn’t written with that in mind, and I think Bernstein & Sondheim were artful enough that they’d have written a different song for a different context.

Fiona points out that Spielberg DOES steal from Wise, just not from WSS. This reflection is pulled from THE HAUNTING, another Spielberg favourite he’s previously remade (very badly indeed). In the Shirley Jackson adaptation, Fiona says, the shot has a very specific meaning — Eleanor is already being absorbed into Hill House. In the Spielberg, it’s just an attractive shot.

Time and again, the Spielberg movie weakens the show’s effects by overcomplicating things. Removing “America” from its rooftop is acceptable, I guess, though keeping it there and using the modern screen’s ability to show a digital cityscape ought to have been irresistible. But here come the extras — here’s a random woman driving past — there’s such an accumulation of unnecessary STUFF.

And you are?

Spielberg doesn’t steal from Wise much but he does steal from himself, particularly the dancehall rumpus from 1941. And here are the heavily backlit cloths for people to appear behind as pastel wraiths — this one goes back to LAWRENCE OF ARABIA I think but Spielberg has been mimicking it endlessly.

There are moments in the Wise where he approaches the splendour of his opening. In “Quintet” — often, in the movie, I found myself wishing for the camera to push in, only for it to remain obstinately static. Here, it pushes in, and the sequence is AMAZING. The cross-cutting becomes absolutely magical — it gives the dramatic connectedness of disparate scenes a significance that transcends narrative and really becomes magic, in the sense of numinous or supernatural. The Spielberg sequence is… good. Decent. It’s been… opened out. He never actually wrecks a song, and if you compare his work with overedited garbage like CHICAGO you can genuinely admire his skill and restraint.

(Actually, maybe “Quintet” should really be done splitscreen, it’d be the only way to get everyone who’s singing in their own scenes on screen at once along with their voices…)

The ending. This is Wise’s other best moment. I think you could copy the effect of the shock tragedy — he actually makes it a shock, even when it’s been heavily telegraphed and we know our Shakespeare — without copying any of his shots or his exact cutting pattern. Spielberg chooses to throw out the underlying IDEAS and his version strikes me as simply ineffective.

Natalie Wood was always your go-to girl if you wanted hysterics, photogenic yet credible, and in the final scene she does walk all over Rachel Zegler. Surely, Zegler has the right to be there, not only by dint of race but by voice. Maybe she needed a merciless number of takes, Robbins-style, to break her down, or maybe she needed Ernest Lehman’s screenplay adaptation of Arthur Laurents’ book, not Tony Kushner’s.

“They even flubbed the ending,” mourned Fiona. The sensation of being in the presence of greatness was very much with me when the Sharks stepped in to help lift the fallen Jet. You can mess with other stuff in that sequence — Lehman, Wise & Robbins evidently wanted to keep it exactly like the play, and it worked perfectly, but you could get away with tinkering. But not with that moment. That’s what the piece is ABOUT. And to add insult, Spielberg chooses to fade out on the cops coming to arrest Chino, who has more backstory here but is still a minor character. It’s like the Hays-mandated ending of THE LETTER. Justice must be served. Appalling.

I haven’t talked about Rita Moreno yet, and I must. She more than earned her Oscar first time out. And she’s excellent here, and she again has a right to be here. Her insertion as a new character does do some violence to the story, though. I liked the original’s Doc (Ned Glass), who I take to be Jewish, an emigre, a survivor of an actual war who can comment on the gang war with the advantage of experience. (IS experience an advantage, though? Experience HURTS.) Doc does get a cameo here, photoshopped in.

Still, I can see why they did it, and even giving Rita a song, purloined from the lovers, kind of works. It’s still a song for them even if she sings it (beautifully). It’s an issue, though. Friar Laurence in R&J is a neutral figure, ideally placed to help the star-cross’d lovers. It kind of doesn’t make sense for her to be Puerto Rican and for the Jets to like her. The Jets are racist — even more so in the remake. The script attempts to cover this, and it’s not wholly successful. It’s passable. But still a weak area. Maybe it’s worth it, to include Rita, and not just as a meaningless cameo.

The other character I’d like to talk about is Anybodys, the tomboy, coded queer, in the original, who is maybe kinda proto-trans in the remake. And apparently trans is a superpower because they can punch out a swarm of policemen. Unless I missed it, nobody calls them by name, and they’ve lost most of their dialogue, which is a shame. I know a character can make an impression without words, but I also know that Susan Oakes got to make more of an impression than Iris Menas in the new version. And Menas’ character being, essentially, unnamed is a shame. If you think about the nickname, implying promiscuity, you have to assume that Anybodys wanted so badly to be a Jet she went with more than one of them, and now they shame her for it. Heartbreaking. The Jets suck.

I guess in the end I’m not nice enough to agree that casting the right ethnicity, unquestionably a good thing to do per se, is enough of a reason to remake WEST SIDE STORY if you can’t make it otherwise better than the original. I’m not really in favour of remaking classics. Make a new film with Puerto Rican characters. Comparisons are odious, so don’t ask for them.

Shopping

The non-essential shops and businesses are open in the UK — bizarrely, the pandemic is less rampant here than on the European mainland right now — so I got my first haircut in a year and hit the charity shops. Amazing what you can find.

My sister, who works in a lab, says now is the best time to go out and do stuff if you’re going to. Later will be more dangerous, probably.

I’ve never see S*P*I*E*S, the failed attempt to reunite the leads of M*A*S*H and I don’t expect it to be any damn good but I bought it for £2 because I’m curious what fresh new flavour of awful it may provide. I think C*I*A would have been a better title — calling up the asterisks of the earlier film but actually making sense. And if your satirical purpose was to do for the intelligence community what you did for the Korean War, you have at least the beginnings of a satirical line of attack, something I doubt this movie possesses. This is directed by Irvin Kershner, specialist in following up other people’s movies. But I’m a Vladek Sheybal completist, as you know.

I’ve seen RED ANGEL, Yasuzo Masumura’s own answer to M*A*S*H, kinda — well, it does deal with medicine in wartime. I found it incredible as cinema and deeply problematic in its attitudes to what it’s showing. The overheated and desperate atmosphere of it was so impressive I’m willing to see it again, and I wanted to own it because I am on some level horribly acquisitive.

Fiona liked Matteo Garrone’s TALE OF TALES more than I did, but it was certainly great-looking.

CEX, the dopily-named second-hand store was open too, but they know how to price the things I want high enough for me not to want them anymore. But I bought THE ‘BURBS on Blu-ray because I couldn’t resist all those extras and I wanted to see the original cut. And A CLOCKWORK ORANGE was actually pretty cheap.

Back to the charity shops — I hit the main clusters, in Leith, Morningside and Stockbridge. My favourite, the St Columba’s Bookshop, is kind of in the middle of nowhere but that’s on the walk between here and Stockbridge so I picked up some comics — The Steel Claw! — and books — The Genius of the System! — and DVDs.

I got Robert Wise’s HELEN OF TROY on a whim because it was only a pound — terrible film, but I don’t think I’ve ever see a good copy — maybe it’ll grown on me — Neil Jordan’s BYZANTIUM was equally cheap — don’t usually like his stuff but he has some ambition at least — MUDER AHOY with Margaret Rutherford was 50p so now I want all her Marple films — JSA: JOINT SECURITY AREA “from the director of OLDBOY” seemed worth a punt at 50p — and THE ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN even though we just watched it, and SHORTBUS because we’ve never seen it. GHOSTBUSTERS I&II — I’ve only seen one of them. I’ll probably never watch the other.

Can you look forward to reading about these films on Shadowplay? Oh, probably not. I have too many films, and too many ways of getting more. But if there are any you really want to hear more about, tell me.

Boldly Gone

So, I’m working on this really exciting project, and it’s going well, but it has become a nocturnal project, which is wrecking my brain slightly. And as a result The Late Show: The Late Films Blogathon just hasn’t happened. It hasn’t happened even more than it usually doesn’t happen (because I don’t chase contributors in a personal and assiduous way). BUT!

Peter Winkler has sent a lovely piece — a vintage review he wrote in 1979 for STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE (late Robert Wise, last Gene Roddenberry, more or less), bracketed by his contemporary observations. It brought back my memories of seeing the film with my mum at the time (and liking it, though she suggested it might be a wee bit long, a judgement I would now support).

Hope you enjoy.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

Produced by Gene Roddenberry. Written by Harold Livingston (and Roddenberry without credit)., based on the story “Robot’s Return” by Alan Dean Foster. Directed by Robert Wise. Cast: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Stephen Collins and Persis Khambatta. 132 minutes. Released by Paramount Pictures on December 7, 1979.

Originally Reviewed by Peter L. Winkler in December 1979 for CineFan Magazine.

I wrote this and several other reviews of sf films released at the end of 1979 while on my Christmas break from law school. I had no expectation that I would end up writing two books and numerous articles decades later. I wanted to see my name in print. At the time, I was still avidly interested in print sf, Star Trek, and sf films. I thought CineFan was worth writing for, and that the editorial barrier to entry was probably fairly easy to overcome.

Star Trek : The Motion Picture succumbs to the disease endemic to the major sf. films of the 70s: a poor story. A strong story can be about a mystery being resolved, a goal being achieved, or diverse characters in conflict. ST: TMP has little of this.

The film is structured as a mystery. Something incredibly powerful has devastated a flotilla of Klingon battle cruisers, and a Federation starbase, and is headed toward Earth. The only available starship is the Enterprise, still undergoing refitting in drydock and not yet finished. With it’s crew reunited, it sets out to meet the impending threat. Unfortunately, the mystery of the alien entity is not worth the two hours it takes to encounter and resolve.

The plot of the film is essentially that of the television series episode “The Changeling.” It’s disappointing enough to see a television episode recycled for the big screen, but if one had to choose a Star Trek tv episode on which to base a major motion picture, “The Changeling” would most certainly not be the one.

ST: TMP’s story, by Alan Dean Foster, is inexcusable. It borrows the plot of the old tv episode whole, amplifies its weaknesses, and pads it to feature length. If you’ve seen “The Changeling” and can figure out what “V ‘GER” is a contraction for, you’ll be able to decipher the feeble plot of ST:TMP in nothing flat. But even if you don’t, the story simply is not interesting or exciting enough to hold you for the time it takes to unfold.

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Alas, ST: TMP also lacks what was one of the strong suits of the best of the television episodes: character conflict. The very manner in which ST:TMP begins, reuniting the old crew, as well as introducing two new characters, is an open invitation for human drama. Some promising starts are made—between Kirk and McCoy, Spock and the crew, and between Kirk and Decker (Stephen Collins) (which short-lived conflict is lifted whole from director Robert Wise’s Run Silent, Run Deep [1958])—but are just as quickly abandoned.

If the film lacks substance, its execution is spotty as well. The special effects are hardly state of the art. While the miniatures are impressive, the optical effects are frequently obvious. Almost uniformly disappointing are the interior sets, hand props, and costumes. Though they have a slick, updated look, they lack the invention of their predecessors.

Despite its poor story and uneven production values, ST:TMP is not entirely without merit. The first half hour has a sustained sense of wonder which is rare in recent sf films. William Shatner, for the first time, gives a controlled performance that helps give the film some dramatic weight. Robert Wise, given a difficult task, gives coherency to an obviously thrown together film. The greatest praise should be reserved for Jerry Goldsmith. His score is simply superb, It saves much of the film, but can stand alone as one of the finest scores for an sf  film, or any film, that I’ve had the pleasure of hearing.

Though not a groaner, ST: TMP is at best a pleasant, sentimental reunion. It could, and should, have been more than that.

In retrospect, I think I may have been a little too hard on Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). In his review, Roger Ebert wrote, ”There is, I suspect, a sense in which you can be too sophisticated for your own good when you see a movie like this.” With some exceptions, it’s slick, impressively executed in spots, moderately engaging and fairly intelligent, a hallmark of the original TV series. Unfortunately, it shares the same flaw as Apocalypse Now (1979): Both films begin with their most exciting scenes. Only Mr. Spock’s spacewalk to penetrate V’Ger’s interior, a sequence devised by some of the film’s effects team, gives the film some much-needed kinetic excitement late in the game. What ST: TMP isn’t is the human adventure the film’s end title promises; the sequel delivered on that adventure. On the other hand, I’m hard-pressed to retract any specific judgement I made in 1979, and a least one other critic, The Cleveland Press’s Tony Mastroiani hit some of the same points as I did. “For all of its length it has about as much plot as one of the original one-hour TV shows, maybe a little less than many of them had,” he wrote. “There isn’t much anybody can do about this except peer at the approaching cluster of light and vapor through TV monitors and cope with occasional malfunctions that threaten to destroy the ship. The film’s chief virtue for fans of the series is its reunion of the original cast after a decade, picking up the old relationships and rivalries, repeating lines of dialog that have become permanently associated with some of the characters.” (“Star Trek –– Motion Picture is bigger, not better,” Cleveland Press December 22, 1979.)

ST: TMP’s troubled production poses the question “What went wrong and who was to blame?” In 1969, NBC unceremoniously cancelled Star Trek. The series became a surprising success in syndication, especially in markets where it was shown in the after-school time slot, where it found its natural audience. Then the Star Trek conventions became a successful phenomenon. Paramount planned a moderately budgeted feature to be directed by Philip Kaufman, but it failed to go into production. Paramount decided to launch a fourth network of syndicated programming. The bait for local stations was to be Star Trek: Phase II, reviving the original series with the original cast. Scripts were commissioned while costumes and sets were being constructed. Then something phenomenal suddenly happened: Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) demonstrated that science fiction could be more than just moderately profitable, but shatter box office records.

Paramount quickly cancelled Star Trek: Phase II and announced a Star Trek feature to be directed by Robert Wise, who had a proven affinity for science fiction, having directed the classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and The Andromeda Strain (1971). What Paramount didn’t have was a screenplay but was committed to deliver the film to theaters in early December 1974. Gene Roddenberry’s screenplay was rejected. Harold Livingston, who had never written for the TV series and was not an sf writer, was hired to turn Alan Dean Foster’s Phase II teleplay “Robot’s Return” into a screenplay. Roddenberry couldn’t keep his hands off of Livingston’s screenplay and rewrote it on a daily, sometimes hourly basis.

Serious trouble arose when the original effects firm, responsible for some award-winning animated TV commercials, produced very little useful. Paramount had to scramble, assembling two parallel effects teams, one run by Douglas Trumbull, the other by John Dykstra. Robert Wise was editing until the last minute available. The prints shipped to theaters were barely dry. Wise was later invited to produce a director’s cut more to his liking. It added a few minutes of running time but simply feels distended. Wise made two more films after Star Trek before retiring.

ST: TMP cost 44 million dollars but proved profitable enough to justify a sequel. By giving himself a writing credit on the screenplay, producer Roddenberry triggered an automatic arbitration over credits conducted by the Writer’s Guild of America. Roddenberry rejected a story credit and received no screen credit. He was blamed for the film’s production difficulties and budget overruns. He was booted from his own brainchild when it came time to produce a sequel: he received an executive producer credit and an undisclosed sum to keep the fans happy. Paramount hired TV producer Harve Bennett to make Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) more efficiently through Paramount’s television division. Nicholas Meyer, with no previous association with Star Trek, wrote and directed what would prove to be the best Star Trek film so far. George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic produced Star Trek II’s impressive effects.

Copyright 1979, 2020 by Peter L. Winkler.