Singin in the Rain vs. West Side Story - Kael vs. Kauffman

An extract from New Republic Film Critic Stanley Kauffman's review of West Side Story. He wrote it in response to Pauline Kael's attack on the film (she's the unnamed "Popular Cultist"):

No one is more jealous of the purity of the popular than the intellectual.  These commentators prefer musicals in which credibility of plot and the quality of the acting are irrelevant (which they are not for West Side Story) and beyond criticism, which exist for their music and dance. But it is in those very terms that these pictures seem to me inferior to the  Robbins-Bernstein-Sondheim work. 

A favorite of the popular cultists is Singin in the Rain (1952);  it contains several bright numbers but apart from the fact that, compared with Robbins' dancers, Gene Kelly is only a hoofer, there are dance routines in Singin in the Rain,  which are indistinguishable from  some of the film's parodies of the early 1930s  dance routines.  On their own terms then, these films of the popular cultists are inferior to films like West Side Story.

Kauffman had christened West Side Story "the best film musical ever made".  Meanwhile, Kael had called it "Frenzied hokum" and stated:

West Side Story begins with a blast of stereophonic music that had me clutching my head.  Is the audience so impressed by science and technique, and by the highly advertised new developments that they accept this jolting series of distorted sounds gratefully—on the assumption, perhaps, that because it’s so unlike ordinary sound, it must be better? Everything about West Side Story is supposed to stun you with its newness, its size, the wonders of its photography, editing, choreography, music.  It’s nothing so simple as a musical, it’s a piece of cinematic technology.

The irony of this hyped-up, slam-bang production is that those involved apparently don't really believe that beauty and romance can be expressed in modern rhythms, because whenever their Romeo and Juliet enter the scene, the dialogue becomes painfully old-fashioned and mawkish, the dancing turns to simpering, sickly romantic ballet, and sugary old stars hover in the sky...