Massively Overrated Movies: A New Blog Series

Tonight, I'm introducing a new feature...Lons' Guide to Massively Overrated Movies.

These will be films from any point throughout history that I feel garner inordinate amounts of noteriety, respect and attention. Sometimes, they will be mediocre movies that are simply overhyped. Sometimes, they will be films I actually think are quite bad, that for some reason or another have managed to stand the test of time.

I think I spent the first 15 years or so of my life watching exclusively overrated movies. In part, I blame my parents. But not in a horrible, neglect or child-abuse type way. They're just not huge movie people. Well, let me rephrase that. My father likes Bond films, Bruce Willis movies and The Big Lebowski. My mother likes British films, small indie movies and The Big Lebowski. So, when they observed my youthful passion for film, they did what they could for me - they took me to lots of movies and enrolled me in local UCI extension classes about film and bought my videos for every birthday - but they couldn't really sit me down and discuss the finer points of Tarkovsky's oeuvre, if you get my meaning.

(Oddly, my brother developed the same interest in movies as I did, despite growing up with the same parents. So, either we have some older relative with a tremendous passion for cinema - at this point, it would have to be from the early silent era or something - or we just influenced one another as kids. Probably that second one, because I haven't heard anything about any great-great-great uncle Dexter Harris, the great silent movie clown.)

So, anyway, this isn't to bash my parents. They're good people. I'm just saying that, until the age of 15 or 16 or so, I had absolutely no idea about film history, and no one around to guide me towards good movies. So I watched whatever titles you heard about commonly as "Great Movies" - stuff like Gone With the Wind, Ben-Hur and The Grapes of Wrath. And, for the most part, I got bored out of my goddamn skull.

(I'm not saying Grapes of Wrath is boring. In retrospect, as a fan of Henry Fonda's, I now see why it's so highly regarded. But at 16, it made me want to sign a petition to outlaw filmmaking, lest I ever have to watch something so dull ever again).

The point is, I can now recognize that a lot of these films, long-since held up as the pinnacle of cinematic achievement, are largely not terribly good. Or at least far more bland and mainstream and less interesting than some of the other movies being made about similar subjects at the same time.

For this debut column, I was going to go after It's a Wonderful Life, that sappy piece of life-affirming nonsense that network TV used to cram down our collective throats every day of December in the 80's, before Ted Turner bought up the rights and mercifully stopped them. But I figured, everyone basically knows that movie's dumb by now, right? There aren't a lot of people who swear by It's a Wonderful Life as great filmmaking. I hope.

No, I figured, to start things off, I better go after a movie people actually love and revere. I mean, I have to provoke a response, right? If I go after a movie and no one gets upset, that movie probably isn't actually being "overrated."

So, who's this week's target? West Side Story. Face.

I think people remember and embrace the spirit of this movie more than anything about the movie itself. I have watched this within the past year-and-a-half or so, and let me assure you - it's a long slog through some lamentably obnoxious songs, bizarrely flamboyant dance routines, sub-high school play performances and leaden, stilted exposition.

Check this...West Side Story won 10 Oscars, and was nominated for 4 more. That includes, remarkably, a Best Director trophy for Robert Wise, a Best Picture Oscar and both the Best Supporting Actress and Supporting Actor awards. (That being said, Rita Moreno, who won for Supporting Actress, clearly gives the movie's only standout performance...George Chakiris, who won for Supporting Actor, is wholly forgettable, which is why no one remembers the name George Chakiris.)

I can imagine being a movie fan in 1961, when West Side Story made its debut, and watching the Oscar ceremony. It was a solid year in film, a year that included The Hustler, Judgement at Nuremberg, Guns of Navarone (I think this probably would have been my favorite of that year), La Dolce Vita, Yojimbo (another possibility for my personal favorite of the year), Roger Corman's The Pit and the Pendulum, Ray Harryhausen's classic Mysterious Island, B-movie classic The Beast of Yucca Flats and John Huston's The Misfits (the last film for both Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable). I would not have been rooting for the 3 hour epic about dancing 50's gangsters.

And, yes, yes, I know, everyone who's a dancer loves Jerome Robbins' choreography, and the songs have become classics despite being horrifically irritating and repetitive. (Daa-daa-daa-daa-daa AMERICA! Daa-daa-daa-daa-daa AMERICA!) And in 1961, the idea that a white could actually love a brown was still groundbreaking. But, I mean, come on...When a movie becomes this silly and dated, that's probably an indication that something is wrong on some level, right?

And I'm not here to knock musicals in general. There are many musicals I enjoy. Even some as ludicrous as West Side Story. Brigadoon, for example, strikes me as a patently ridiculous story which features an array of songs, only a few of which are classics. But I could see through all that to the energy and enthusiasm and craft of the production, to enjoy the movie.

But this 60's and 70's movement in musicals, these long, belabored, self-important musicals like West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof and (shudder) The Music Man just drive me batshit insane with their bogus wannabe "big numbers" and their 180-minute plus running times. And let's not even get into Jesus Christ, Superstar, a movie so obnoxious that it stands out even amidst the disasterous resume of Andrew Lloyd Webber and director Norman Jewison. (More on Jewison, I guarantee, in a later Overrated Movies column.)

I should note here, as well, that there's a 60's musical about which I'm on the fence. See, My Fair Lady is a really dazzling production that looks great, and Audrey Hepburn is ceaselessly charming in just about every film she made, so it has some big pluses. But a lot of the songs are similarly annoying ("Warm face/warm hands/warm feet/oh wouldn't it be...loverly?") What the hell is loverly?

West Side Story, to my mind, stands as the pinnacle of this downward spiral. These are the movies that killed the movie musical. They were trying desperately for importance and social relevance, when the place for movies where happy, lively characters burst into song without warning is clearly as escapist entertainment. No one's going to learn valuable life lessons from a movie about enthusiastic, merry street thugs threatening to kill one another in between working on their spirit fingers. (NOTE: This is not always the case...I'll grant that, on rare occasions, a musical has been able to make a social statement successfully. Wizard of Oz, for example, speaks to political and social issues in American life that may not be immediately apparent just through its fantastical story and the flying monkeys. And Brecht, after all, wrote some musicals. I'm just speaking in terms of mainstream movie musicals with obvious, rather non-artistic thematic statements. Like, you know, "racism is bad and occasionally gets in the way of unconvincingly-acted young love").

For those of you who haven't had the distinct opportunity to watch this extremely long film, let me give you the basics: Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" is remodeled into a story about a white gang member, Tony, and a Puerto Rican girl, Maria, who fall in love. But, see, Tony's gang (the Sharks) is constantly clashing with Maria's brother's gang (the Jets) in a series of goofy-looking dance-offs interrupted by spurts of violence. The story's point-of-view on racism is best described as simplistic. At worst, it could be considered offensive. It reduces the complex problem of racial relations into such a simplistic formula..."Well, the cliquishness between these races and the intolerance has prevented these two sweet kids from getting together...Racism must be wrong, then!"

But, really, the racial message isn't the center of the film, it's just the backdrop. The movie itself is really an attempt to combine a romantic teenage drama along the lines of Rebel Without a Cause with an oversized, old-fashioned, toe-tappin' musical. It's a failure, to my mind. Unconvincing, shallow drama teamed with dance numbers that, while impressively-shot and grand in scale, just plain look silly and go on and on and on without end.

I'll grant you, I don't know a lot about dance or choreography. But with so many musicals, that doesn't matter. The fact that I might have to know about why Robbins' work is so impressive (and, again, I grant you that the scope is impressive) speaks to why the film, in an overall way, just doesn't hold up 40-some years after its release.

A final thought: West Side Story could use much, much, much, much less finger-snapping. We get it...They're playing it cool, boy...Real cool...