September 6, 2008: West Side Story
Sometimes watching movies is more like work than it is like fun, and this can particularly be the case with 1960s Best Picture winners. I can recall watching A Man For All Seasons in school and finding it quite dull. I just recently saw The Sound of Music for the first time, I had been avoiding it since I assumed I would not like it, and I was correct. Doesn’t it make sense, then, that I might have the same trepidation about West Side Story, also viewed recently for the first time?
Well, I enjoyed this one FAR more than The Sound of Music. I’ve been working through the Best Pictures I’ve never seen, and still have some work to do in the 1960s, but West Side Story seems deserving. It’s an edgy story, certainly told in an edgy way for the time, and it holds together nicely, with low-key dance/song routines fitting into the story, mostly eschewing the jarring big production numbers which make me leery of these Broadway musical film adaptations.
Now, everyone has always raved about Rita Moreno’s Best Supporting Actress-winning performance, and I have to say that it really didn’t do it for me. Maybe it’s the political incorrectness of the fake exaggerated Puerto Rican accent, or maybe it’s something about the attitude of the character, and surely I don’t understand the pressures of being an immigrant trying to make a life in a big city, and I most certainly don’t connect with those pressures when they are distorted through the lens of a stage musical. I don’t normally begrudge anyone their Oscars and I don’t begrudge Rita hers, but I likely won’t be revisiting the movie any time soon.
The film was shot in Super Panavision 70, which was not uncommon for big-budget productions in that decade (The Sound of Music, Lawrence of Arabia, 2001: A Space Odyssey), which results in a final aspect ratio of 2.2:1, somewhat narrower than the typical (at that time 2.35:1) widescreen aspect ratio. This has to do with the frame size and shape on the 65mm negatives, and placement of the audio tracks on the distribution prints. Long story short, these 70mm epics are typically a little narrower than a typical Panavision-style widescreen film, unless they are shot in Ultra Panavision 70 or equivalent (such as Ben-Hur at 2.66:1), but that’s another story altogether.
So you’d expect to see roughly a 2.2:1 aspect ratio on this DVD. Not so. I didn’t measure specifically on my 16:9 monitor, but it looked like about 1.9:1. I really don’t know why this is done for home video transfers, and it’s not at all uncommon. The effect isn’t huge, but on a movie like this with carefully composed widescreen dance numbers and standoffs, a few people are half disappearing off the edge of the screen. Disappointing, particularly for an Oscar winner for Cinematography (colour).
The video release version of the new Sex and the City movie runs about 2 hours and 25 minutes, which is only about 7 minutes shorter than West Side Story. The latter seemed a bit long, but I can’t imagine how much longer the former must seem. You may not see that review coming up anytime soon.
{ 1 } Comments