The film opens on a finger snap. No dialogue, no exposition, just a helicopter shot dropping out of the Manhattan sky onto a playground, and then a gang of young men moving down a street with the coiled economy of dancers pretending not to be dancers. Sixty-five years on, that prologue still works, and it works partly because of something the audience in 1961 could not have known. The block they are dancing on was already condemned.
West Side Story shot its street scenes in February 1960 on West 68th Street between Amsterdam Avenue and West End Avenue, in a neighborhood then called San Juan Hill or Lincoln Square. Demolition was scheduled. Robert Moses had the whole area slated for clearance to make room for what became Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and the wrecking was held off long enough for the production to finish. The playground sequence was picked up across town on East 110th Street between Second and Third, then cut together so the two locations read as one neighborhood. Everything else was shot on soundstages at Samuel Goldwyn Studios in West Hollywood.
So the Jets and the Sharks are fighting over turf that was being erased while the cameras rolled, in a neighborhood that had been predominantly Black and Afro-Caribbean, home to a serious music scene, before the bulldozers came. The film never says any of this out loud. Lincoln Center itself has since written about it at length, which is one of the stranger acts of institutional self-examination in American arts. Knowing it changes how the prologue lands. Those boarded windows behind the dancers are not set dressing.
The picture came from the 1957 Broadway musical conceived and directed by Jerome Robbins, with music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Arthur Laurents, transposing Romeo and Juliet to New York street gangs. Ernest Lehman wrote the screenplay. Robert Wise, who had never made a musical and who had cut Citizen Kane as an editor, produced and co-directed with Robbins.
That arrangement did not survive the shoot. Robbins demanded take after take, the production went over budget and behind schedule, and the financiers fired him with roughly 60 percent of the film in the can. Wise finished it and then brought Robbins back to help edit. Both men took directing credit, and at the 34th Academy Awards both men won, the first shared Best Director Oscar in the Academy’s history. Robbins collected an honorary award the same night for his choreography on film. He never directed another movie.
The tally that night was ten Oscars from eleven nominations, still the record for a musical. Best Picture. Best Director. George Chakiris for Supporting Actor as Bernardo, Rita Moreno for Supporting Actress as Anita. Cinematography, art direction, costume design, editing, sound, and the score. The only loss was Lehman’s adapted screenplay. You can see the whole slate at the Academy’s page for the film.
What holds up and what does not is worth being honest about. Natalie Wood‘s Maria was sung by Marni Nixon, the ghost singer of half of Hollywood’s golden-age musicals, and once you know that, the disconnect between the speaking voice and the singing voice is hard to unhear. Richard Beymer‘s Tony is the film’s weak center, a leading man playing at street kid and never quite landing it. The brownface makeup applied to much of the Sharks cast is exactly as bad as you remember, and Moreno has spent decades saying so in public.
Everything else is close to untouchable. The Robbins choreography is the finest ever committed to film, and the dance at the gym, with the Jets and Sharks trading the floor in a mambo that turns into a challenge, is the sequence that every director shooting a musical since has had to reckon with. Daniel Fapp’s Technicolor is saturated to the point of hallucination and then drained for the rumble under the highway. Bernstein’s score does something that almost never happens in movie musicals, which is get harder and more dissonant as the story darkens rather than softer.
And there is Moreno, who takes a supporting part and walks off with the film. “America” is a comic number until it is not. The drugstore scene late in the picture, where Anita is surrounded and taunted by the Jets, is one of the most brutal things in a studio musical from that era, and Moreno plays it without any of the softening a 1961 audience might have expected.
She is 94 now, still working, still one of a small handful of people holding an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony. When Steven Spielberg remade the film in 2021, Moreno served as an executive producer, played a new character named Valentina, and sang “Somewhere.” Ariana DeBose then won Best Supporting Actress for playing Anita, which made two Oscars for the same role, sixty years apart, with the first winner in the room.
The 1961 film runs 152 minutes and was made for $6.75 million against $44.1 million at the box office, an enormous return for the era. It plays best big, with the overture running over Saul Bass’s abstract title card while the audience settles. If a repertory house near you puts it up, go. If not, find the best screen in your house, turn the volume higher than feels polite, and start it cold without reading anything first.
Then watch the prologue again, once you know what was standing behind the dancers and what was coming for it. The movie is about two kids from opposite sides of a street war. It was filmed on the last days of a real neighborhood that lost the same fight, and nobody involved seemed to notice the rhyme.
