Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 115

West Side Story, Kennedy’s Camelot &
Postwar to Early 1960’s America
Everyone told us...it was suicidal. I don’t know how many people
begged me not to waste my time on something that could not possibly
succeed. After all, how could we do a musical where there are two
bodies lying on the stage at the end of the first act and everybody
eventually dies...a show that’s so filled with hatefulness and ugliness?1
Leonard Bernstein on the musical West Side Story
Post-World War II America seemed to offer all the promise and economic
opportunity of the American dream. Yet, cultural tensions were rife by the end of
the 1950s. Increasingly, “hatefulness and ugliness” threatened to rupture the social
fabric of this expansive era. From its inception in 1949 to the early 1960s, the
production of West Side Story tapped into these social tensions. On the stage (19571959) and the screen (Mirisch/United Artists, 1961) Leonard Bernstein’s musical
captured the fleeting romance and heroism of a “Camelot” era. West Side Story
illuminated postwar cultural dissension by combining the classical musical with
juvenile delinquent gangsters, ethnic strife and dark urban crime to undermine the
mythic idealism of “Camelot.” I will examine this Camelot period and West Side
Story as a cultural, industrial and generic product of late 1940’s to early 1960’s
American society. Studies on the early 1960s and its relation to the postwar era are
notably scarce, tending to neglect this initial period (instead limiting consideration
to radical avant-garde and subsequent film trends later in the decade). This study
will focus on the postwar cultural shift through the early 1960s which precipitated
pivotal changes in American society and the Hollywood film industry to investigate
the relationship between American cultural history and the generic development
of Hollywood films.

Heroism & Dissension: A Postwar Era in Flux
The early 1960s were an extension of this postwar era spanning the late 1940s
and ‘50s. In fact, the social tumult of the late 1960s emerged out of 1950’s cultural
tensions that culminated in the early 1960s and exploded later in the decade. Fredric
Jameson suggests the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy played a “significant
role in delegitimizing the state itself...seeming to mark the decisive end of the
well-known passing of the torch to a younger generation of leadership, as well as
the dramatic defeat of some new spirit of public or civic idealism.”2John F. Kennedy