Welcome to Saturday Night at the Movies.

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's film is the musical drama released by United Artists in 1961, "West Side Story."

It's based on the Broadway musical that premiered in 1957 and boasts the same creative team of Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and Arthur Laurents.

Robert Wise shared directing credits with Robbins.

"West Side Story" stars Natalie Wood, with Richard Beymer, Russ Tamblyn, Rita Moreno, and George Charkiris.

The few adult characters are played by Simon Oakland, Ned Glass, William Bramley, and, uncredited, Penny Santon and John Astin.

The film takes place on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where two youth gangs compete to control the streets among the run-down buildings.

One gang, the Jets, is made up of white teenagers and led by Riff, while the other, the Sharks, is made up of more recent arrivals from Puerto Rico, and led by Bernardo.

The two gangs taunt and skirmish with each other, leading Riff to decide to challenge the Sharks to a rumble that will settle once and for all which gang will control the neighborhood.

The Jets plan to issue the challenge to the Sharks after a dance at the local recreational center, which is considered neutral territory.

Riff seeks out his old friend Tony, co-founder of the Jets, to come to the dance and take part in the rumble, but Tony has moved on.

Riff finds him working a Doc's, a local drugstore, and plays on Tony's loyalty to persuade him to attend the dance.

Tony reluctantly agrees.

At the dance, the white kids and the Puerto Rican kids stay away from each other, even when Glad Hand, the emcee, tries to get them to mingle.

But in the midst of the dancing, Tony spots Maria, Bernardo's sister, who has only recently moved to the mainland, and the two fall in love at first sight.

Bernardo angrily tells Tony to stay away from Maria and sends her home, but Tony searches her out, and the two declare their love for each other on the fire escape outside her window.

Meanwhile, the Jets and the Sharks meet and make plans for a rumble, a rumble that Riff expects Tony to be part of.

With his newfound love for Maria, Tony is determined to be a conciliator rather than a fighter, but the hostility between the Jets and the Sharks and the relentless violence of the streets threatens the young couple and all their dreams of a life together.

"West Side Story" began as an idea director Jerome Robbins had for producing an updated musical version of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet."

Instead of belonging to two feuding families, the star-crossed lovers would come from two different ethnic groups living in close proximity but mutual enmity with each other.

Robbins recruited Arthur Laurents to write the musical's book, and Leonard Bernstein to write the music.

Initially, the two warring groups were to be Jews and Irish Catholics, but when Laurents finished his script, the collaborators realized it was basically a dramatic rehash of "Abie's Irish Rose," a play with a similar story that premiered on Broadway in 1922 and ran for more than five years.

The project lay dormant until 1955, when Laurents and Bernstein met in Beverly Hills and talked about reimagining the musical as a conflict between white and Hispanic gangs in Los Angeles to be called "East Side Story," but Laurents argued for a change in setting to New York City.

He and Bernstein contacted Robbins, who enthusiastically agreed to direct.

Since Bernstein wanted to concentrate on the score, Laurents approached Stephen Sondheim to provide the lyrics.

After encouragement from Oscar Hammerstein, Sondheim agreed.

Once the creative team had dealt with other commitments, "West Side Story" went into production.

Bernstein later told Rolling Stone, "Everyone told us that it was an impossible project, "and we were told no one was going to be able "to sing augmented fourths, as with ♪ Maria "and then we had the really tough problem of casting it, "because the characters had to be able not only to sing, "but dance and act and be taken for teenagers."

Ultimately, some of the cast were teenagers.

Some were 21.

Some were 30, but looked 16.

Some were wonderful singers, but couldn't dance very well, or vice versa, and if they could do both, they couldn't act.

Despite these problems, when it opened on Broadway in September of 1957, "West Side Story" was a major hit, and went on to become one of the most popular musicals of all time.

When the same creative team that created the musical was recruited with co-director Robert Wise to turn it into a movie, it was perhaps no surprise the film was also a runaway hit that has, over the years, become a classic.

The problem of finding performers of the right age who could act, sing, and dance that plagued the producers of "West Side Story" on stage wasn't really a concern for the movie.

As film historian Richard Barrios wrote in 2020, "From the very beginning of musical films onward, there are multiple examples of on-screen actors whose singing was supplied by someone else.

This was the film world into which 'West Side Story' emerged, and its producers decided very early on that a performer's ability to sing was not as important as her or his ability to look and act the part."

Both Natalie Woods and Richard Beymer's songs were sung by others and even Rita Moreno was partially dubbed on "Quintet", the song sung before the rumble, because some of the music was too low for her voice.

Only George Chakiris of all the principles, did all his own singing and only because he had no solos.

Much more important to the movie were its innovative music and dance, the contributions of Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins.

When production started Robbins was to choreograph and direct all the dance sequences, and Robert Wise was to direct the rest of the film.

But Robbins' perfectionism led to delays and cost overruns and the producers soon put Wise in charge of the entire movie.

In the event, Robbins directed the dance sequences of the "Prologue", "America", "Cool", and "Something's Coming", while Wise directed the other dance numbers with the help of Robbins' assistance.

Robbins worked his dancers relentlessly and the results show in the finished film.

The dancers wore out 200 pairs of shoes.

The jeans the gang members wore were reinforced with special elastic thread to accommodate the stress of the dancing, but even so, actors split 27 pairs during filming.

They also suffered shin splints from dancing on streets and sidewalks on location.

Arranger, Saul Chaplin wrote in his autobiography, "Jerry was by far the most exciting choreographer I have ever watched.

At the same time, he was such an insane perfectionist that it was impossible for any of his dancers to achieve the standards he demanded immediately.

I wondered how he ever got anyone to work for him until I asked one of the dancers.

The reply was, 'How else would I ever get a chance to dance like that?'"

A shadow cast over the 1961 film version of "West Side Story" is its portrayal of its Puerto Rican characters.

On the one hand, the film version changed some original lyrics of "America" considered offensive to Puerto Ricans to instead reflect the discrimination and racism they encountered on the mainland.

On the other hand, Natalie Wood and George Chakiris, who were of Russian and Greek descent respectively, were cast as Puerto Ricans and performed in brown face, wearing the same dark makeup used for all the Puerto Rican characters, including Rita Moreno.

She complained in a radio interview in 2021, "It was so thick and it was so dark that our faces would streak and show our real color underneath.

And I remember saying to a makeup man once, 'I don't know why I have to be this color.

This is not my color.'

And he actually said to me, 'What are you?

Racist?'"

"West Side Story" was both a critical and a popular success.

It was the highest grossing film of 1961 and the highest grossing film of all time until surpassed by "The Sound of Music" four years later.

It was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and won 10, including best supporting actress and actor for Rita Moreno and George Chakiris; best musical score; best picture; and a best director award shared by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, who notably did not thank each other.

The record of the film's soundtrack was number one on Billboard's stereo album charts for 54 weeks, the longest run of any album in the magazine's history.

A new film adaptation with Hispanic actors playing the Puerto Rican characters was released 60 years after the first, in 2021.

It was directed by Stephen Spielberg and choreographed by Justin Peck with a screenplay by Tony Kushner.

Rita Moreno appeared as a new character, Valentina, Doc's widow.

Roger Ebert offered a reassessment of the 1961 "West Side Story" in his series on great films.

"West Side Story," he wrote, "remains a landmark of musical history.

But if the drama had been as edgy as the choreography, if the lead performances had matched Moreno's fierce concentration, if the gangs had been more dangerous and less like bad boy Archies and Jugheads, if the ending had delivered on the pathos and tragedy of the original, there's no telling what might have resulted."

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies".

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.