West Side Story (1961)

Official trailer

West Side Story is the 1961 American musical directed by Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, adapting the 1957 Broadway musical by Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, and Robbins.

The film transplants Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to the streets of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The Jets, a gang of working-class white youths, feud with the Sharks, a gang of Puerto Rican immigrants. Tony, a former Jet, falls in love with Maria, sister of Sharks leader Bernardo. Natalie Wood plays Maria. Richard Beymer plays Tony. Russ Tamblyn plays Jets leader Riff.

George Chakiris plays Bernardo. Rita Moreno plays Bernardo’s girlfriend Anita. Ernest Lehman wrote the screenplay. Mirisch Pictures produced the film on a budget of approximately 6 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 44 million dollars worldwide. The work won ten Academy Awards including Best Picture.

The music is what owns me here. Bernstein’s score and Robbins’s dances hit me harder than nearly any other American musical, and on those alone I’d be tempted to go higher. What holds it at a 9 is the casting, with Natalie Wood playing Maria in brownface, a studio choice that makes me wince whenever she’s on screen.

The film is one of the classic American musicals and the dominant film musical of its decade. The Bernstein score and Sondheim lyrics gave the form material that exceeded what stage musicals typically received. The Robbins choreography brought a balletic seriousness to American street violence. Robbins and Wise’s co-direction credit reflects production conflicts that resulted in Robbins being removed from the film midway through shooting. Chakiris and Moreno won Best Supporting Actor and Actress.

Its racial politics, and the casting behind them, are still argued over, and Spielberg’s 2021 remake answered them differently. The result is a film whose musical achievement remains undisputed even as its cultural elements have been re-examined.

Bernstein and Sondheim

The Bernstein score combined jazz, Latin rhythms, and modernist concert music in ways American popular music hadn’t previously combined them. The Cool sequence uses fugue structure. America employs cross-rhythms drawn from Puerto Rican folk forms. Maria is built on the tritone interval that medieval theorists called the devil in music. The score treats the audience as capable of receiving sophisticated material that Broadway had typically diluted.

Sondheim’s lyrics were his first major produced work. He was twenty-five when he wrote them. The work contains lines he later considered embarrassing including parts of I Feel Pretty. The overall achievement remains considerable. The lyrics to America compress immigrant ambivalence into a debate format, and Somewhere refuses the conventional optimism the musical form typically demanded. The score and lyrics together raised what musicals could attempt.

Somewhere is the song that wrecks me. I think Sondheim’s refusal to promise a happy ending is the bravest thing in the score, and I’ll forgive him every clumsy line in I Feel Pretty for it.

The Robbins Choreography

Robbins had been a classical ballet choreographer at New York City Ballet before West Side Story.

He brought ballet vocabulary to gang violence. The Jets snap their fingers and execute pliés. The Sharks dance with the controlled aggression Robbins had developed working with George Balanchine. The choreography refuses to treat street violence as anything other than dangerous while making it visually beautiful.

The opening sequence introduces the Jets through fifteen minutes of dance-fight instead of dialogue. The audience learns who these characters are through how they move. Robbins showed that dance could carry narrative weight that dialogue conventionally handled. The result became standard for later dance films. La La Land, In the Heights, and others trace their vocabulary to the West Side Story opening.

That opening is my favorite fifteen minutes in any musical. The finger snaps and the pliés carry pure menace, and I understood the Jets completely before anyone said a real line.

The Casting Question

The original production cast white actors in many Puerto Rican roles. Natalie Wood plays Maria in brownface makeup. Tenor Jimmy Bryant dubbed Richard Beymer’s Tony. Rita Moreno, who was Puerto Rican, has discussed the brownface makeup applied to her despite her natural complexion being suitable. The choices reflect 1961 Hollywood casting practices that later decades have evaluated differently.

The 2021 Spielberg remake cast Puerto Rican actors in the Puerto Rican roles. The remake also left the Spanish dialogue without English subtitles. Both films treat the same source material. The two films make different choices about who should play which roles, and those casting decisions carry political content. The 1961 film’s musical achievements remain. The casting questions are real and worth engaging.

The music wins this argument for me and the casting loses it. The worst detail is Rita Moreno, a Puerto Rican actress, being darkened with makeup anyway. It’s such a pointless insult.

Does West Side Story still hold up?

It’s a 9. The Bernstein and Sondheim score raised what musical material could attempt, the Robbins choreography proved dance could carry a story, and I think both still set the bar. The casting is the flaw, from Wood’s brownface to the makeup on Moreno, and it’s the reason this falls a point short for me. Watch it if you care about American musicals or Shakespeare adaptation, and watch it knowing what 1961 Hollywood got wrong.

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