Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 125

West Side Story and Kennedy’s Camelot

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The film required a method o f avoiding censorship problems regarding
uncompromising depictions of violent youth gangs since the Production Code
Administration initiated a campaign against juvenile delinquency films, getting
the studios to “avoid making movies on the subject...except in a serious and mature
vein.” In fact, by July 1961, The New York Times stated: “Films about juvenile
delinquency have almost vanished. The disappearance of the inexpensively made
pictures filled with youthful crime and sex has been the result of a campaign by the
movie industry that began in 1958” by the PCA.12 West Side Story's lavish 70mm
Technicolor roadshow aesthetics, not to mention its prestige Broadway musical
adaptation, effectively functioned as a savvy production strategy successfully
employed to comply yet circumvent such censorial restrictions and enable the
depiction of taboo subject matter. The film presents another bedrock of institutional
stability, the American family, as fragmented, dysfunctional or nonexistent— like
gangster films, the youth gang as surrogate family appealed to an emerging postwar
teenage baby boom market. In 1955-56 a young Sondheim, in his first Broadway
collaboration after writing for TV, destroys conventional notions of the nuclear
family, childhood innocence, even sanity in West Side's musical lyrics to instead
focus on social issues indicative of hard-hitting realism and postwar crime dramas:
drug abuse, alcoholism, juvenile delinquency, psychological instability, child abuse,
collapse of the American family. Even comic relief is scathing, angry. In the Jets’
musical number “Officer Krupke,” Sondheim writes:
Our mothers all are junkies, our fathers all are drunks. Golly Moses—
natcherly we’re punks...We’re very upset; we never had the love that
every child oughta get. We a in ’t no delinquents, w e ’re
misunderstood....My parents treat me rough. With all their marijuana,
they won’t give me a puff. They didn’t wanna have me, but somehow
I was had. Leapin’ lizards—that’s why I’m so bad!...This boy doesn’t
need a judge, he needs an analyst’s care! It’s just his neurosis that
oughta be curbed—He’s psychologically disturbed!...this child is de
praved on account he ain’t had a normal home....My father is a bas
tard, my ma’s an S.O.B. My grandpa’s always plastered, my grandma
pushes tea. My sister wears a m ustache, my brother wears a
dress....that’s why I’m a mess!13
Crime is at the forefront of this musical: murder is choreographed, coded, and
gang rape is implied; the candy store is an ominous, claustrophobic setting of
racial prejudice and fatal misinformation—where Anita is victi