West Side Story goes high-def for its 50th anniversary

It’s been fifty years since the musical West Side Story first graced the big screen, and at the time it became more popular than the Broadway musical which birthed it (the show received mixed reviews and lost the Best Musical Tony to The Music Man). Thanks to the enduring popularity of the movie, the show has had a continuous life on stage with Broadway revivals, community theater performances, and it’s a perennial for high school productions (the kids are actually the right age!). And with the 50th Anniversary, MGM/20th Century Fox have put together a new home video edition in a standard and collectible format, remastered for Blu-ray, just in time for holiday gift-giving. You won’t find a review of the movie itself here, but let’s take a look at how the film fares in its sparkly new high-def edition …

Most people probably know the story by now … rival gangs in New York, a forbidden love, singing, dancing, tragedy. It’s basically the Romeo & Juliet story set in the mean streets of New York and the clashing cultures of the era. For a film of this vintage, the new high definition transfer on the Blu-ray is stunning. The opening overhead shots of the city are breathtaking, and the picture is so sharp that you can easily spot the transitions from actual locations to soundstage sets (most notable are the painted backdrops) and rear projection shots. If you’ve ever only seen a faded print of this movie on TV or VHS, the colors are also eye-popping, giving the movie a comic book aura. But even with all of the oddities the high definition reveals, they don’t detract from the movie as a whole. My only issue is with the new DTS 7.1 audio. It sounds great when the orchestra kicks in, but there’s just a little too much directionality for my taste, having voices of characters on screen spread across the entire front speaker spectrum. Someone’s on the left side of the screen, the voice comes from the left speaker. It’s weird. I like the on-screen voices to come from the center speaker unless they’re actually off-camera. But there is a Dolby Digital 4.0 track that you can switch to if the new mix isn’t to your liking.

Bonus material on Disk 1 –

• Play with Pow! The Dances of West Side Story: this is an In-Movie Viewing Mode that will pause the movie and bring up video footage of various dancers, choreographers, actors and others associated with the film (or those who just love the movie) to talk about the dance sequences in the movie. Once the little segment is finished, the movie resumes. A nice little feature, but you certainly want to watch the movie itself first if you havn’t seen it yet.
• Song specific commentary with Stephen Sondheim: activating this feature accesses the film’s musical numbers (not in their entirety) with audio commentary from Sondheim. It’s interesting to listen to him describe the process of writing the songs for the Broadway show (his first major credit) and how some things that were cut from the show made it into the movie. He dishes some gossip as well — he hates “I Feel Pretty” because the lyrics don’t sound like words that would actually come out of Maria’s mouth; a lot of the music came from other Leonard Bernstein scores like Candide; Sondheim got almost universally terrible reviews for his lyrics when the show first opened on Broadway. It’s an interesting listen and you don’t have to sit through the entire movie to hear it all.
• Music Machine: a featurette that combines all of the film’s musical numbers into one film of its own, without all the pesky dialog and plot.

Disk 2 –

• A Place for Us: West Side Story’s Legacy — two short featurettes that can be played separately or together. The first part, “Creation & Innovation,” takes a look at how the show portrayed America at that moment in time, and how the film and show have influenced other musicals, movies and TV shows (most recently, Glee). The second part, “A Timeless Vision,” takes a look at the color spectrum used in the movie and wonders if this actually influenced Bollywood; shows how the movie and show are referenced in modern movies and TV shows (like Family Guy), and how organizations use the movie today to address social issues like gangs.
• West Side Memories — a 2003 documentary about the making of the show and the movie featuring a lot of behind-the-scenes people and secondary character actors with only a few fleeting glimpses of stars Richard Beymer, Rita Moreno and Russ Tamblyn (and, sadly, none of the movie’s stars are featured in any of the new 50th anniversary material).
• Storyoard to Film Montage — comparing the pre-production drawing to certain scenes in the movie set to music
• Trailers — a collection of three trailers, but the one marked as the “original” trailer bears a different date than the film’s actual release.

Disk 3 contains a standard definition DVD of the movie mastered from the high definition elements, and the Music Machine feature

While I wasn’t impressed with some of the extras on the disks, especially for a 50th anniversary edition, there is also a box set that includes a tribute CD with eight songe performed by artists as varied as Julie Andrews and Gloria Estefan; a hardcover book with rare photos and a foreward by Walter Mirisch (the film’s producer); and ten collectible postacrds features movie poster artwork from around the world. If you’re a die-hard fan, you will definitely want the box set, and casual fans will be happy with the film’s presentation on the Blu-ray (the remastered DVD looks nice as well). This should make a perfect Christmas gift for the musical fan in your life!

This review is based on a commercially available Blu-ray provided to CliqueClack by 20th Century Fox Home Video for reviewing purposes.

Clacked by Chuck Duncan
on Dec 10, 2011 @ 13:56 EST5EDT