The first of four musicals to win Best Picture in the 1960s, West Side Story (1961, Mirisch Pictures, Inc. and B and P Enterprises, Inc.; United Artists) nearly catapulted itself into the elite realm of films to have won 11 Oscars, the current record (in 1961, only one film to date had done so: 1959’s Ben-Hur). Instead, the film fell one Oscar short, winning all but one of its 11 nominations: Art Direction (Color), Cinematography (Color), Costume Design (Color), Music (Scoring of a Musical Picture), Film Editing, Sound, Directing for Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins (Robbins also received an honorary award for his choreography), Actor in a Supporting Role for George Chakiris as Bernardo, Actress in a Supporting Role for Rita Moreno as Anita, and Best Motion Picture (the film failed to take home the Academy Award in its nominated category of Writing [Screenplay based on material from another medium]). Rita Moreno would go on to become one of a very elite group of entertainers to win the “grand slam” of American show business: capturing a Grammy, a Tony, and an Emmy (well, two Emmys actually) in addition to her Oscar. West Side Story remains the winningest musical in Oscar history (although I would probably argue that The Sound of Music is the greatest musical to ever win BP, but that is just me…).

Maria (Natalie Wood), Anita (Rita Moreno), and Bernardo (George Chakiris) at the dance at the gym.

None of the film’s memorable songs was eligible for an Oscar since the Academy requires that a song be specifically written for a film in order to qualify for the competition (hence, Original Song). Fun fact: prior to 1941, the only requirement for a Best Song nominee was that the tune had to appear in a film that was released during the award year; but as you can imagine, that lack of specificity led to a few controversies. For 1961, the award for Music (Song) went to Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer for the lovely “Moon River” from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a legitimate winner, in my opinion, even if West Side Story’s “Tonight,” “America,” or “Somewhere” had qualified (but, man, do I get goosebumps every time I listen to the Ensemble version of “Tonight”—reminds me of “One Day More” from Les Misérables).

West Side Story’s songs are not original to the film because the film is based on the smash Broadway play of the same name. In the late 1940s, Jerome Robbins, who would become the choreographer and co-director of West Side Story, proposed an idea to Leonard Bernstein (the composer) and Arthur Laurents (the writer) for a new musical based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Robbins’ original idea was for the musical to focus on anti-Semitism, presenting a conflict between a Jewish family and an Irish Catholic family set in New York’s Lower East Side. The play’s original title was East Side Story, which doesn’t quite have the same ring as the final product’s name does! Laurents wrote the story, but the three men felt that the topic had already been addressed in other plays and abandoned their project. Nearly five years later, Laurents and Berstein met up in Hollywood. As fate would have it, their conversation turned to juvenile street gangs, a relatively new element of society that was fast making headlines in the 1950s. The men decided to return to their earlier project, East Side Story, and alter it to focus on Puerto Rican immigrants in Harlem and the gang environment there. The creators of the newly titled West Side Story now brought in a young Stephen Sondheim (the lyricist), who at the urging of Oscar Hammerstein agreed to assist with the musical’s songs. The result was a show that led one critic from the New York Daily News to exclaim, “This is a bold new kind of musical theatre – a juke-box Manhattan opera. It is, to me, extraordinarily exciting.” West Side Story ran on Broadway for 732 consecutive performances before going on tour. It nearly won the Tony Award for Best Musical of 1957, losing to The Music Man.

As we discussed a few months back with 1948’s BP winner Hamlet, Shakespeare’s genius is endlessly drawn upon for film inspiration. What is interesting about West Side Story’s take on Romeo and Juliet is how the film replaces the Montague-Capulet family feud with ethnic gang warfare, a concept that was anything but foreign at the beginning of the 1960s during which sit-ins were occurring across the South, as were the Freedom Rides and the integration of public schools. The conflict between love and hate in West Side Story plays out against the backdrop of racial inequality, a sick feature of society that still thrives today. West Side Story, though memorable for its classic songs, its stars like Natalie Wood, and its tragic teenage melodrama, really poses several extremely applicable questions: What makes an American? What is the solution to teenage lawlessness and delinquency? How does love persevere in a world full of hatred?

For more thoughts on West Side Story and its significance, please check out the full post this weekend!