Sentence:  The task of taking the raw material of Marcel Pagnol 's original trio of French films about people of the waterfront in Marseilles and putting them again on the screen , after their passage through the Broadway musical idiom , <WSD>was</WSD> a delicate and perilous one , indeed . 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  have the quality of being; (copula, used with an adjective or a predicate noun)