I briefly considered the recent Steven Spielberg remake but it received only middling reviews and I realized I’d never seen the original anyway. I wasn’t too enthusiastic either about watching yet another iteration of Rome and Juliet but I should do it anyway as a kind of completionist achievement. Unfortunately I found it to be fairly underwhelming. It’s a dance-centric rather than a music-centric and almost all of its songs are forgettable. The two sides, the Sharks and the Jets, are very much not equal as the Puerto Rican Sharks have a far more compelling story to tell. I think I prefer pretty much any of the other versions of the familiar story to this.

Two rival gangs vie for control of the streets of the Upper East Side of New York City, the white Jets who are led by Riff and the Puerto Rican Sharks who are led by Bernardo. They constantly fight in public, causing trouble for the local police force under the command of Lieutenant Schrank. Adults try to encourage friendship between the two gangs in a local dance hall to no avail. But there Bernardo’s sister Maria meets Tony, Riff’s best friend and a now reluctant member of the Jets. The two fall in love with each other at first sight but Bernardo orders her to go home. After the dance, Riff and Bernardo agree to have a rumble, a fight to decide matters once and for all. Meeting at the fire escape outside Maria’s apartment and later at the bridal shop where she works, Maria persuades Tony to stop the rumble. When Tony shows up at the agreed location under the highway, his attempts to break up the fight is interpreted by Bernardo as cowardice. This only causes Riff to escalate by pulling out his knife.

There can hardly be any surprise in any adaptation of this age-old tale so it is all down to the execution and production values. It is immediately evident that this feels much more like a stage performance caught on camera than a normal film. Every set is a stage and every actor is a dancer first and foremost. Their body movements and even facial expressions are stylized and carefully choreographed. It’s a little silly how every little plot development is conveyed as a song, including one member of the Jets telling the others to calm down after the big fight. Leonard Bernstein’s music is fine but the lyrics are uninspiring and downright cringeworthy. Maybe they were trying hard to use language that was cool among the kids by the standards of the 1950s but the words and phrases feel so terribly dated today. On the whole, it’s just not a very impressive spectacle. There are probably only one or two songs that might stay in your mind afterwards and that’s it.

What this iteration changes is bringing the story to the US and making it about racism. Though Bernardo seems unduly vicious as a gang leader, the Sharks as a whole have better developed characters and are more sympathetic. They truly are being oppressed in America and even Schrank is racist against them so it makes sense that they’ve formed a gang as a means of self-defense. I like the song in which they both bemoan how poorly they are treated in the US yet maintain how it is still better than staying in Puerto Rico. The Jets claim that they’re just defending their turf against newcomers but it’s not like they have a lack of public spaces to hang around in. It’s not like the film shows them actually engaged in any kind of criminal moneymaking activities so they don’t really have a turf to defend. Plus of course the running joke is that the Jets are made up of immigrants like Polacks too, it’s just that they arrived a little earlier. This makes them feel like little kids playing on the street while the Sharks really are a gang. It’s not a bad interpretation but that’s as deep as it goes. As with other similar stories, we never see any of their parents, which allows them to simplify the setting and the plot considerably.

Anyway, I’m mainly disappointed in that there is nowhere as grand a spectacle as I expected. I’m sure it worked well enough on the stage during its time, but we’ve seen been spoiled by the lavish musicals of Jacques Demy and even more recent hits like La La Land. This original version of West Side Story simply can’t compare in terms of production values. Perhaps I might have been persuaded to take a look at the Spielberg version if I liked the music more but no, it’s just not worth it.