Jerome Robbins’ and Robert Wise’s West Side Story (1961)

We could write on so many aspects of Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise’s West Side Story – the ground-breaking choreography, the cutting edge music, the maturity of former child-actress Natalie Wood, the weirdness of Richard Beymer’s post-Story film career, the imminent fading of the musical as a viable Hollywood genre – but really Your Humble Commentator isn’t fully qualified to take on those topics in this short space. So, today, we want to talk about the Shakespearean adaptation film. Film Club has made it a habit to screen one of these each year, including recently Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (Macbeth) and Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet, (Hamlet).

Robbins and Wise’s West Side Story is, of course, Romeo and Juliet set in a modern, or 1960s, New York. But a more specific question is: is it Shakespeare? A purist will tell you that what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare is language; it’s not his play if they don’t say “But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east and Juliet is the sun,” and transform the ether into living space with his awe-inspiring imagery and syntax.

The story, on the other hand, is not original even to Shakespeare. Many versions came before he wrote the play in the mid-1590s, including a major poem by Arthur Brooke, “Romeus and Juliet,” published in 1562, on which much of the play is based. So why don’t we say that West Side Story is really a version of “Romeus and Juliet”? The easy answer is because Shakespeare made Romeo and Juliet famous, and no one today has heard of Arthur Brooke. A more complicated answer is that Shakespeare’s work stands so tall that his versions of stories (and all but two of his plays are based on external sources) blot out their antecedents and affect our impressions of every version that follows, even without his words.

A brief aside: Your Humble Commentator once attended the Centenary Shakespeare-on-Film Conference which took place in 1999. A centenary conference celebrates, obviously, the 100-year anniversary of something, so that suggests that the first Shakespeare to be committed to film occurred in 1899. The film, specifically, was a one-minute short, a scene from King John. But think about that: the first Shakespeare film had none of his language (because films were silent) and only one excerpted scene from the play (one minute instead of two and a half hours of narrative). In addition, the film was made more as a novel advertisement for a stage production going on at the time than intended as a stand-alone albeit brief feature. That said, the world’s foremost authorities of the field known as “Shakespeare on Film” gathered together and celebrated this anniversary despite the original film’s rather tenuous ties to Shakespeare’s work.

That’s how it goes. Even without Shakespeare’s language, we consider adaptative versions of his plays still akin to Shakespeare’s work. Whether you watch Ten Things I Hate About You (The Taming of the Shrew) or She’s the Man (Twelfth Night) or Forbidden Planet (The Tempest), you are going to enter into a conversation that is as much about Shakespeare as it is about the film you’re watching. Take She’s the Man. Twelfth Night is a rather complex comedy, both subtle and direct in its characterizations and plotting in ways that can be made to please on many levels. She’s the Man, its adaptation set in a modern boys school where Amanda Bynes is “passing” in order to hold her twin brother’s place at the school, play soccer and, eventually, get close to a boy she likes, is a farce, a physical and unsubtle form of comedy. Without Twelfth Night, She’s the Man draws commentary as a product of the teen sex comedy genre and is either remarkable or not as a result of its generic choices. With its connection to Twelfth Night, Bynes’ character, Viola, must contend with all the Violas of history, and Andy Fickman’s film enters into a conversation that necessarily includes 400 years of Shakespearean precedent.

So as you watch West Side Story, you are also watching Romeo and Juliet; the parallels and deviations are part of this larger conversation. What does it mean that we’re telling a version of the same story 400 years later? How are Tony and Romeo related? Or Maria and Juliet? Does the musical genre suggest, metaphorically, that Shakespeare’s language, when brought into the modern age, becomes song – structured, lyrical thought? What other ways does the conversation between the two works leave you understanding both better, more deeply?

Or ignore Shakespeare. West Side Story is one of the great films of the 20^th century, and a great story, something that both screenwriter Ernest Lehman and Shakespeare recognized as they adapted it for their respective mediums.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Stephen Frears’s High Fidelity (2000)

One question we encounter frequently with film, because so many movies are derived from books, is 'which is better, the original text or the cinematic version?' In a way, this is an unfair question. After all, each medium stands on its own, so a movie is either worthy or it isn’t regardless of where its script originates. What’s more the question tends to get asked only when the book is of note. Alfred Hitchcock, for example, made a great movie called To Catch a Thief (1955) with a screenplay from a David Dodge book of the same name. As much as we say about Hitchcock’s auteurist and distinctive approach to film-making, the movie followed the text very closely. But no one remarks on that because few have ever heard of the book.

That’s less true of a book and movie like High Fidelity (or for that matter True Grit, a highly acclaimed novel from the 1960s that has now been made into two famous movies, the most recent of which, by the Coen brothers, may win an Oscar). A conversation about High Fidelity frequently includes references to Nick Hornby’s novel. In both works, John Cusack plays a local record shop owner who spends much of his time reviewing the rollercoaster of his romantic relationships. The most charming aspect of Hornby’s book is that Rob specifies his moods and concerns by making lists – lists of albums, lists of his own life events, lists of musicians. At one point, for example, he lists his top five break ups of all time.

But Rob’s lists represent a desperate attempt to put the things that happen to him romantically in some sort of context because he “fails to comprehend the complexities of the female gender [and] surrounds his attempt to understand his current challenging break up through the examination of his past failed romances.” Rob fights off this pattern of self loathing and self deprecation by creating the lists and constantly asking his friends to create lists, like ones of their top 10 artists of all time. When it comes down to it, Rob is a true music lover, and a true romantic. He’s struggling to find out who he is, and ultimately, why did those girls dump him!

In the book, these lists are hilarious little side-bars, which evoke for the reader either mystification (what’s that about???) or sympathetic connection. They’re like organized similes. For director Stephen Frears (The Grifters, The Queen), the challenge is to take something fairly literary but essential (the lists say a ton about Rob’s character), and translate it into a medium that is visual and realistic. Part of the success of the film version is Frears’ choice of John Cusack, an award winning actor, to play Rob.

John Cusack’s Rob is hopelessly lost, forever confused lover boy of the late ‘90s. Cusack is the kind of actor whose sincerity and perpetual youthfulness allow him to pull off the very literary sort of lines that open the film: “What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music? Rob tries to answer the questions we are too scared to ask ourselves! Was she the right one? Or did I just let the right one slip between my fingers? Shit… is there even someone who is the one?” NO body talks like that. But by the end of the speech, we like Rob, partly because we like Cusack.

So where does all this get us? If you haven’t read the book, it won’t matter. The movie is the movie. Cusack is Rob. The writing is engaging and fun. If you have read the book, you have the option on a great conversation. The question is never “which is better?” It’s how do the two works talk to each other? What does Cusack do to your original impression of Rob? What did Frears choose to leave out, and what effect did that have? What insights did the film’s changes (differences from the original text) reveal about what the film-maker thought about the story? Or what impact did experiencing the story in a visual medium rather than a literary one have on you? Those are fun questions. We hope you enjoy High Fidelity and come up with some questions of your own. Or if you haven’t read the book, maybe you’ll check it out so you can.

C. Dowdle and R. Findlay
Film Club