"WEST SIDE STORY"

A big, visual feast of a musical. This is musicals done right. The film presents an obvious problem to be overcome: how do you make murderous gang members sing and dance?
First, you use New York City as a go-between. These gangs, this story could only happen in New York. So then immediately characterize New York as inherently musical, and you’ve got a way in. How do you characterize New York as musical? You start with a graphic that’s an indecipherable diagram of the city’s outlines—each building composed of little bars, it looks more like some sort of sheet music than a cityscape. Appropriately, then, the orchestra plays the various musical pieces over this graphic, as its background changes color with the change in tune. Then, with the music still booming, the graphic morphs into an actual aerial shot of what it was tracing—downtown New York. The music fades into the sounds of the city as various helicopter shots (all moving west) follow the streets and their tributaries. Then, a high shot of a playground as the music begins with a blast of brass.
And so begins the next essential step. The film, having already established that music pulsates rhythmically through New York’s streets, begins its introduction to the neighborhood “toughs” by having them snap. This is not singing or dancing yet, but it is undeniably musical, in the most basic sense. As each new gang member is introduced to the beat of the snapping, the camera moves left, also to the beat. The cinema and the musical are fused! Anyway, the gang, as they terrorize a stray Puerto Rican who’s wandered onto their turf, gradually move in more and more balletic movements—but it’s subtle. It starts when one of them toys around with a basketball, and the group assumes different basketball positions, but in sync. Thus the ballet is introduced through other physical, semi-choreographed activities. This scene is great because it establishes the “rules” of the film almost immediately (in that this is the opening scene), but gives the audience time and a way to get used to it. By the time they are running all over, jumping and stretching out their arms, we buy it.
What one forgets is this film doesn’t just give a treatment of racial dynamics as cursory as you’d expect from a musical. The number “America,” specifically, references the myriad problems facing immigrants in the States at the time, as well as many of the benefits of being in New York. The men are identified with the old way; the women seem more content with leaving San Juan behind in the dust. The movie also realizes what is really at stake between the white guys and the Puerto Ricans is not “turf,” but protecting the sexual-racial borderlines. Inevitably the hypocrisy of this way of thinking is also portrayed, as the Jets terrorize and nearly quasi-rape Anita when she comes into the store. While it is realistic, the film is not without its problematic aspects in terms of stereotypes, as the pacifist storeowner is played with a thick Jewish accent. His role as mediator also implies that he is somewhere between white and Puerto Rican. Also, the fact that the leads do not look racially distinct at all (Tony is dark-haired and Maria is of significantly lighter hair and skin tone than her Puerto Rican amigas), and are each given ethnically ambiguous names is enough to make your eyes roll.
The film thrives in nearly every area; each gang is given a specific costume design, and when Tony and Maria start to transcend the cultural borders, each starts to mix and match the colors of each side. The film also pushes what you can do with musicals in cinema—one of the best scenes has to be the one at the dance hall where Tony and Maria first see each other and, oblivious to everyone else, share a dance as the backdrop morphs into the skyline of a starry fantasy world.
What the movie proves is that at its most rudimentary level, film can give musicals more rhythm. For example, in many dance sequences, we have a shot of one side of the group, then a shot of the group opposite them, imitating them or doing something different. You can create this division on stage, but by cutting it into two shots and cutting from one to another, you give the scene a beat.
As wonderfully as the director and choreographer convince us that it’s normal for knife-wielding thugs to sing and dance, the mix between harsh realism and musical fantasy isn’t always a convincing one. For example, after their leader Griff dies, it’s hard to believe that one of the Jets would want to break out into song about how they have to keep it cool, and then dance about it. Sometimes it works, though. Like when Tony has died in Maria’s arms and she starts crooning—here it feels like an opera. Generally, the film is dark for a musical, but never quite seems like it reaches the darkness of what it’s actually portraying. Three people die! Two in knife-fights. Only the storekeeper seems to understand the weight of what’s going on around him. The ultimate cop-out is the betrayal of the Shakespeare ending by not having Natalie Wood’s character die at the end. What, just ‘cause she’s Natalie Wood? If you’re going to go for tragedy, then go all out.
Finally, perhaps the least best thing about this movie musical romance is the romance. Whoever plays Tony is a doofus, and Natalie Wood certainly isn’t at her best. But it doesn’t matter, because what goes on around them is so fun to watch and so beautifully mounted that we forget about them.

"NETWORK"

Good lord. This film is huge. HUGE. The scale of it blows the mind. It manages to be both a fairy tale and a compelling study of realistic characters. It is both an outlandish satire and a searing expose. But then again that’s the point: in this day and age of television, fiction (and its forms and narrative structures) has fully fused with reality, such that the two are indistinguishable. In the post-modern world, nothing is “real” and nothing is “fake.” TV fiction feeds off of real people, who feed off of TV fiction.
One doesn’t really realize how deep-rooted this theme is in the film until the very end. The movie’s scale seems small at first. Its slow burn pace might not work for everyone. The beginning-- we take the serious voice of the narrator to be merely a way to introduce us to the characters. We notice nothing shocking about the workings of the network, and think Peter Finch’s character really is nuts. Enter Faye Dunaway, her scheme for a terrorist sitcom, and the high ratings that Finch’s character gets after Billy Holden lets him stay on the air, and the scope widens a bit. It’s now a satire. Then Dunaway’s takeover of Finch’s show, dressing the production up with a soothsayer, some stain-glass windows, and an audience that cheers with gusto as Finch faints at the end of every show, and the movie now becomes absurdist. Cue the romance between Dunaway and Holden, borne of his fear of death and her need for some attachment to someone who isn’t as lifeless as she is, and the film grounds itself to a certain extent. The overarching metaphor becomes clear. Media needs real people need media. Humanoids need humans. But the film doesn’t stop there. Finch meets the head of the corporate conglomerate, and his booming rhetoric and the way he’s shot convince us as well as Finch that he more or less is God. And so Finch’s character doesn’t seem quite so crazy. The film circles back on itself once again; it strays from the real pathos of the scenes between Holden and Dunaway for the sake of the ultimate in surreal—a corporate God and his news anchor messiah.
Here we notice how far the film can push irony. Finch previously ranted and raved against modern media’s dehumanization, as the men at the network gleefully reaped the benefits of his sky-high ratings. Then, touched by Ned Beatty’s God figure, he flips and preaches strictly the corporate agenda of dehumanization, to be met with piss-poor ratings.
The mad genius figure of Beatty’s character, which stretches satire so far that it stops mocking something real and becomes its own fictional form, brings enlightenment to the viewer. That narrator, heard at the beginning and occasionally throughout, is not just a narrator. He is meant to be reading the story of the film to you as if it was a fairy tale. Because it is. It transcends satire by not pretending like it is smarter than what it is satirizing. In fact it is what it is satirizing; it is another fictional form through which we are absorbing “reality.” But the difference is that Paddy Chayefsky’s characters, due to their profession, are always self-conscious that they are equal parts human and media, always conscious of their roles in the script they’re playing out. “I’m supposed to be the romantic; you’re supposed to be the hard-bitten realist!” Holden yells at Dunaway at one point. In this film, lines like that oddly don’t put you off; in fact you laugh at them.
One can probably guess from my description of the plot that the aforementioned gradual widening of scope, the oscillating ways that the movie works, don’t always come off as neatly as hoped. As the viewer is constantly reevaluating what the movie is, the pace can feel start and stop. But Lumet deserves credit for packing scenes with more dramatic and relevant punches to the stomach than many a film. And sometime in the last 30 years, the fairy tale became even more true, such that the brilliance of the film will be appreciated now more than before.
But make no mistake; this is Paddy Chayefsky’s movie all the way. He nails it. This film isn’t about TV or the news. It’s about his characters, and how they got to be the way they are. But you don’t need me to tell you that. They’ll tell you themselves. That that actually works here is a credit both to Chayefsky and Lumet. The film is titanic.