Rooftops

Rooftops is the usual movie compilation of street scenes, gang wars, and turf violence. The only unusual thing about the movie is that it was directed by Robert Wise, a veteran filmmaker who should’ve known better.

Presumably Wise was tapped for the job because of West Side Story, which he won an Oscar for directing (actually co­directing, with Jerome Robbins). Wise has also made some snappy, realistic street dramas, including the tough boxing movies The Set-Up and Somebody Up There Likes Me, before his films began to grow more sluggish and elephantine (The Sound of Music, Star Trek – The Motion Picture).

Rooftops has some small similarity to West Side Story. The main characters are young and forgotten by the rest of the world. They also break into dance every now and then, though not in the exalted manner of West Side Story. The movie has us believe that these toughs perform something called the “challenge dance”; instead of using their fists, they shimmy around each other until one opponent backs down. Hmm.

The main character is a loner known only as T (Jason Gedrick, recently quite good in Promised Land), who lives, like many others in the neighborhood, on the rooftop of an abandoned building. He sleeps in the water tower on top, which he’s decorated with found furniture. As he says after the bad guys have destroyed his home, “It was just a busted-up water tower, you know, but I made it mine.” (Terence Brennan’s script is not strong on memorable dialogue.)

Like most of the other rooftop dwellers, T appears to be a dance and fitness enthusiast. These kids may be poor and homeless, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of opportunity ­for aerobic activity. The main gathering place is a vacant lot full of music and swaying bodies, where T meets a cute young thing named Elana (Troy Beyer). Elana claims to be a waitress, but she’s actually working the streets on behalf of the movie’s chief sleazeball, Lobo (Eddie Velez).

Lobo is responsible for bad things happening, and it’s T who must eventually swat him down. There’s also a young Hispanic Mickey Rooney role taken by Alexi Cruz, as a chirpy graffiti artist named Squeak.

Wise brings a whiff of West Side Story to the dance between T and Elana, as they try to sneak a kiss in a nightclub when the power goes off. But West Side Story was stylized and intentionally artificial, while Rooftops is gritty and supposedly realistic. As is often the case in movies, stylization wins.

First published in the Herald, March 1989

Ten years passed between Star Trek and this film for Wise; he’d complete only one TV-movie before hanging it up. At least this one was more spirited than the Macy’s parade balloon that was the ’79 Trek.