Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decid­ed to Go for It

Six­ty years ago, Rita Moreno made Oscars his­to­ry when she became the first Lati­na to win an act­ing Oscar for her role as Ani­ta in the 1961 musi­cal West Side Sto­ry – famous­ly, she also gave one of the short­est speech­es. A true Hol­ly­wood trail­blaz­er, Moreno’s career stretch­es all the way back to the old stu­dio sys­tem, when she was spot­ted by an MGM tal­ent scout as a teenag­er in New York City.

“I can’t think of any­body I’ve ever met in the busi­ness who lived the Amer­i­can dream more than Rita Moreno,” says Nor­man Lear at the start of this doc­u­men­tary, which takes a lin­ear approach to Moreno’s long list of achieve­ments (she is one of just 16 peo­ple with an EGOT) and the numer­ous chal­lenges and set­backs she has faced since mov­ing from Puer­to Rico at aged five.

Mariem Pérez Riera’s film offers insight into the cast­ing prac­tices of Old Hol­ly­wood that saw Moreno emu­late Eliz­a­beth Tay­lor in a bid to impress MGM mogul Louis B May­er. There were no per­form­ers who looked like Moreno at the time and Tay­lor was the clos­est she had to a role mod­el. To con­tem­po­rary audi­ences, it is shock­ing to see the heavy dark make­up applied to a young Moreno in a string of ​“native girl” parts (as Moreno refers to them). This was still the case for the His­pan­ic per­form­ers when West Side Sto­ry was made.

Now in her eight­ies, Moreno is still prob­a­bly best known for her role as Ani­ta, but this film isn’t mere­ly a West Side Sto­ry ret­ro­spec­tive. Clips are not relied on but help to illus­trate Moreno’s impact as a ver­sa­tile film, stage and tele­vi­sion per­former. The mix of talk­ing heads – fea­tur­ing Moreno and the likes of Lin-Manuel Miran­da, Glo­ria Este­fan and Whoopi Gold­berg – with present-day vérité footage and archival inter­views paints a vivid por­trait of Moreno’s per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al strug­gles and triumphs.

One recur­ring theme is of a woman who has been treat­ed like a doll through var­i­ous stages of her life. Moreno’s on-off rela­tion­ship with ther­a­py adds to this, and top­ics such as the Hol­ly­wood men who sex­u­al­ly assault­ed her, her tumul­tuous rela­tion­ship with Mar­lon Bran­do, and a mar­riage that was not as hap­py as it seemed are clear­ly dif­fi­cult for her to dis­cuss. Moreno’s painful rec­ol­lec­tion of a back­street abor­tion is jux­ta­posed against the cur­rent polit­i­cal cli­mate in the US; her stance on this issue is unwa­ver­ing (“A woman should have the right to an abor­tion if she needs it”).

Through all the acco­lades bestowed by col­leagues, crit­ics and even pres­i­dents, the doc­u­men­tary is at its strongest when it speaks to Moreno’s impact on future Latin Amer­i­can per­form­ers, giv­ing them the role mod­el she nev­er had. At the time of writ­ing, Moreno is still the only Lati­na to win an act­ing Oscar. Despite the shifts in Hol­ly­wood that are cov­ered here, there are still bar­ri­ers to break through.