West Side Story (Beta Productions, The Mirisch Corporation, Seven Arts, United Artists, 1961)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 16) Turner Classic Movies (TCM) reached the midpoint of their “31 Days of Oscar” commemoration during which they devote the entire month of February, plus the first three days of March, to movies that either won or at least were nominated for Academy Awards. Last night’s theme was movies set in or around New York City, and the first on their agenda (at least the earliest my husband Charles and I watched) was the 1961 version of West Side Story. It was based on the 1957 mega-hit musical composed by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Arthur Laurents adapted fairly loosely from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. (I remember a great comment the late San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen published when Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film of Romeo and Juliet came out. A teenage girl coming out of the theatre told him, “It was great – but they stole the plot from West Side Story!”) I was eight when the 1961 West Side Story came out and I immediately hailed it as the greatest movie ever made, and when the 1962 Academy Awards came around I wrote down the winners (for the first, but not the last, time in my life!) and was gratified that West Side Story won 10 of the 11 awards for which it was nominated. I saw it three times on its initial theatrical run and twice more when it was reissued in 1970, but that time around the bloom was decidedly off the rose and I noticed flaws that had eluded me eight years before, notably the weak casting of the leads.

As almost all the world certainly knows by now, West Side Story tells of the rivalry between two New York street gangs, the largely ethnic white Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks. Tony (Richard Beymer) is a former Jet who’s retired from the gang life and taken a job as a stock boy at Doc’s (Ned Glass) candy store, but Riff (Russ Tamblyn), the Jets’ leader, wants him back for a battle royal with the Sharks. Riff and the Sharks’ leader, Bernardo (George Chakiris), arrange a meeting at a dance at the local gym – proclaimed “neutral territory” by the rival gangs – to hold a war council to plan the upcoming rumble. Tony is practically dragged there by Riff, but once there he meets Bernardo’s sister Maria (Natalie Wood, top-billed) and is instantly smitten with her. The problems are not only that the Sharks and the Jets are bitter enemies but Maria already has a Puerto Rican boyfriend, Chino (Jose De Vega, whom Charles thought looked oddly Asian; he wondered whether Chino was from a Filipino family who had emigrated to Puerto Rico), who’s a lot more important to this story than the equivalent Paris is in Romeo and Juliet. Nonetheless Tony and Maria agree to meet later that night on a fire escape (the closest Arthur Laurents and screenwriter Ernest Lehman – the one contributor to West Side Story who got nominated for an Oscar but didn’t win – could get to a balcony). Tony thinks he’s neutralized the threat by negotiating so that the rumble will consist only of a fistfight between a champion from each gang, but when the event finally occurs both sides sneak in switchblades. Bernardo kills Riff and Tony, out of revenge and hurt, kills Bernardo. Bernardo’s girlfriend Anita (Rita Moreno) is understandably angry that Maria is still swearing her love for Tony even though Tony killed her brother, and in the end – instead of the famous suicides that end Shakespeare’s play – Chino kills Tony with a gun he’s got from somewhere and Maria grabs the gun from him and forces the surviving members of both gangs to declare peace. A lot of critics faulted the ending of West Side Story for allowing Maria, unlike Juliet, to live, but that’s not the biggest problem.

One major problem with the movie is the filmmakers, directors Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins (Robbins had directed the stage version solo and the filmmakers brought him in for the movie with the idea that he would direct the big dance numbers, as he had on stage, and Wise would do the plot parts, but midway through the production Robbins was fired after they’d shot most of the numbers), made the same mistake that producer Arthur Freed and directors Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen had made with the last big film of a Leonard Bernstein musical, On the Town (1949). They shot the opening sequence in New York City (on abandoned tenement blocks that were about to be torn down to make room for Lincoln Center) and created a spectacularly authentic scene that only made the rest of the film look more “fake” than usual because it was all studio-bound. At least one set, the outside window of Doc’s store, gets seen so often we want to wave to it and say hello. The other problem with the movie is the strangeness of the casting. Natalie Wood is spectacularly miscast as a Puerto Rican and it seems amazing to me that the most famous movies about juvenile delinquency, this one and Rebel Without a Cause, both featured her even though that wasn’t her image at all. Richard Beymer is almost totally inert; after West Side Story he got to do one other major movie, playing Nick Adams in a film awkwardly titled Ernest Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man, before he sneaked back to the maw from which he’d been pulled: television. What’s more, of the five principals only George Chakiris did his own singing: Wood was dubbed by Marni Nixon (voice double to the stars; she’d already doubled for Deborah Kerr in The King and I and would go on to sub for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady), Beymer by Jimmy Bryant, Tamblyn by Tucker Smith and Moreno (who’d sung for herself in The King and I) by Betty Wand.

Now for the good news: Bernstein’s score, orchestrated by Irwin Kostal and conducted to the nines by Johnny Green, remains imperishably beautiful. Its characteristic combination of soaring quasi-operatic lyricism (which was why Rita Moreno didn’t get to do her own singing as she had in previous musicals) and driving percussion-driven energy. What’s more, the people behind the camera – cinematographer Daniel L. Fapp, production designer Boris Leven, and set decorator Victor A. Gangelin – allowed the backgrounds actually to be colorful. They didn’t decide to represent urban poverty by making everything all dank greens and browns the way a modern version of the story would do it; scene after scene is literally a feast for the eyes, dazzling us with ultra-bright colors. Sondheim’s lyrics match the brilliance of Bernstein’s music and come close to what he would later do on his own as composer as well as lyric writer, and his acid-tinged jibes in the song “Gee, Officer Krupke” look forward to similar satires in his own big shows, like “A Little Priest” in Sweeney Todd and “It’s Hot Up Here” in Sunday in the Park with George. The film is also impeccably paced, with number following number with freight-train regularity – though, as with most musicals, the story gets considerably talkier as it progresses. And while the stars may be weak, the supporting players are powerful and thoroughly consistent: there’s a reason why George Chakiris and Rita Moreno both won Academy Awards for their performances while Wood and Beymer didn’t even get nominated. They just stand out that much better – as does Russ Tamblyn, the true unsung hero of this movie.

Dwight Macdonald faulted the film on its initial release for, among other things, having cast the big fight scenes, including the final rumble, in a partly realistic and partly stylized version which he called “nonart.” But while the confrontations in West Side Story may bear little resemblance to actual teen street violence then or now (of course now the gangs would be dealing drugs and be armed with better guns than the police trying to catch them – represented in West Side Story by two cops, Simon Oakland as plainclothes detective Schrank and William Bramley as uniformed officer Krupke, of almost Keystone-esque incompetence), they work on their own terms as half turf battles and half choreography. West Side Story is strangely moving almost in spite of itself – Chino’s murder of Tony seems almost like an afterthought and Maria’s final speech doesn’t have the wallop of Friar Laurence’s in Shakespeare, in which he finally brings the warring families together after the deaths of both their star-crossed heirs – but the combination of Bernstein’s music and the dazzling cinematography make it hold up surprisingly well. One thing I hadn’t remembered was how tight the actors’ pants were; they showed off much bigger baskets than were common in 1961 movies, which no doubt pleased Bernstein, Sondheim, Laurents and all the other Gay or Bisexual men who’d been instrumental in creating West Side Story in the first place. And I loved the bizarre character of “Anybody’s” (Susan Oakes), the androgynous female who tries to join the Jets and participate in the gang fights, even though she keeps getting snubbed by the male members of the gang. I haven’t seen Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, and I’m sorry he missed what I thought would be the most workable way to update it to the present: make the Jets Black, so it would be a war between Black and Puerto Rican street gangs much like the Black vs. Latino wars that have plagued all too many modern U.S. cities.