Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 118

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Popular Culture Review

Korean conflict from 1950-1953 became the first twentieth-century war America
did not win, thereby shattering a national sense of invincibility following World
War II (134-137). HUAC, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “Red Scare” and Hollywood’s
infamous “blacklist” spanned postwar decades from the late 1940s-1950s to promote
a kind of national conformity and anti-Communist xenophobia—reinforced by the
Cold War Space/Arms race in the late 1950s-early 1960s, and the Iron Curtain and
Berlin Wall in 1961. The resurgence in immigration to the U.S. in the late 1950searly 1960s made the white ethnic and Puerto Rican racial issues in West Side
Story more topical. Increasing 1950’s civil rights protests led to “Brown vs. Board
of Education” racial desegregation strife in 1954, bus boycotts in 1955, sit-ins in
1960 and the “Freedom Riders” in 1961.
The postwar “years of transition”—extending from the end of World War II to
Kennedy’s assassination in 1963—ushered in the emergence of a growing youth
counterculture and increasing aesthetic experimentation in Hollywood films
beginning in 1963 through 1976. West Side Story tapped into these cultural tensions
and anticipated experimental film trends. Its production lifetime spanned the postwar
period from its inception in 1949 to its release in 1961, the year of Kennedy’s
Presidential Inauguration which resonated in this inspiring, ill-fated Camelot era.
Cold War xenophobia and civil rights racial dissension were articulated in West
Side Story's innovative aesthetics incorporating Latin jazz into its musical score
and violent murder into choreographed dance.

Origins of West Side Story—from Stage to Screen
West Side Story was initially conceived by director-choreographer Jerome
Robbins who approached Leonard Bernstein on January 6, 1949 to collaborate
with Arthur Laurents on a modem, tragic musical which does not f [[