Whatever may be good or not so good about Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story (the word on the street is “don’t expect too much”)…let’s let that go for the time being. I haven’t watched Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ 1961 original since the Bluray came out…what, eight or nine years ago? I’ve always felt that the Wise-Robbins was too middle-class, too prettified, too brightly lighted, at times even antiseptic feeling. But there’s one unassailable portion, and that’s the first ten or twelve minutes — that magnificent overture, those sky-high helicopter shots of Manhattan, the Jets vs. Sharks street ballet.
