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West Side Story (1961)
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Movie Review by Jarrod
November 19th, 2007
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'West Side Story' is an exuberant, ingeniously-choreographed musical retelling of Romeo and Juliet, with Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer as the ill-fated lovers, who are associated with different warring street gangs, the Sharks and the Jets. The Sharks are Puerto Rican, led by Bernardo (George Chakiris). Wood is his sister Maria. The leader of the Jets is Riff (Russ Tamblyn), and Beymer is Tony, his friend and fellow Jet member. Tony tries to play peacemaker, which doesn't work out that well. Natalie Wood is radiant, practically flawless in what would be arguably her most famous role, 20 years before her mysterious death. Her singing voice was dubbed by Marni Nixon, the same as Audrey Hepburn's in My Fair Lady. Rita Moreno won an Oscar for wonderful performance. Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim are a nearly incomparable duo, and the songs they wrote for this movie are simply exquisite. You might know one of them, "I Feel Pretty" from Anger Management; Jack Nicholson makes Adam Sandler's character sing it. Beymer is really the weak link here, not much personality, at least compared to everyone else, but I wouldn't call him terrible, either, and that is a relatively minor complaint.
The film won 10 Oscars, including Best Picture, the aforementioned Moreno, one for Chakiris, and one for Best Director (Robert Wise, who also did The Sound of Music), though Wise collaborated with Jerome Robbins, who is responsible for that brilliant choreography I talked about earlier. 'West Side Story' was the first big musical of the 1960s, and would be followed by My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and Oliver, all of which won Best Picture, which was really quite unheard of, and is a trend that will never be reproduced, unless the musical genre is magically revived, which is doubtful.
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