#Themes in intermission film movie#

This can be traced to the story’s origin on the stage.

Though the politics of West Side Story may be delivered subtly, the aesthetics of the film are anything but. Impeding their journey to a happily ever after is a looming war between the Jets and the Sharks, disapproval from their families, and the racial prejudice of the time period, all of which Lehman, Robbins, and Wise navigate with surprising grace in a genre built around rejecting subtlety. Tony and Maria meet at a dance and it’s love at first sight. It doesn’t take a genius to deduce that the story of the Jets and Sharks, two juvenile gangs (white and Puerto Rican respectively) whose rivalry escalates into outright antagonism when Tony (Richard Beymer), the former leader of the Jets, falls for Maria (Natalie Wood), the sister of Bernardo (George Chakiris), the leader of the Sharks: is an indirect adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Like other iconic pieces of art, such as 10 Things I Hate About You and The Lion King, West Side Story’s plot has its roots in the works of William Shakespeare.

#Themes in intermission film movie#

Fortunately, Lehman, Wise, and Robbins succeeded brilliantly, and even fifty years and one upcoming remake later, the 1961 film still stands as a towering cinematic achievement and one of the best movie musicals of all time. As we’ll see later, a story made for the stage functions very differently for the screen, and there are a multitude of missteps a creative team can make while translating the story. So, when screenwriter Ernest Lehman and directors Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins were tasked with bringing Auther Laurents’ now iconic Broadway musical West Side Story to the silver screen, it went without saying that they had their work cut out for them. What works as an epic oral poem won’t necessarily translate to a television miniseries or narrative videogame. What he meant by this phrase was that the medium you choose to tell your story is just as, if not more important than the story itself. In 1964, communication theorist Marshall McLuhan penned the well-known phrase “the medium is the message” in his book “ Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man”. West Side Story (1961) still dazzles fifty years later thanks to its raw performances, timeless themes, and catchy melodies.