What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1961

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1961
The Year: 1961
What the Nominees Were: Fanny, The Guns of Navarone, The Hustler, Judgment at Nuremberg, West Side Story
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Other than one racist depiction, Breakfast of Tiffany’s is a great film. Over in France, Jean-Luc Godard was still turning out great films like A Woman is a Woman.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: West Side Story
How Hard Was the Decision: Hard, because Judgment at Nuremberg is pretty great, and West Side Story is rightly criticized these days for not casting Latino actors as some of the Puerto Rican characters, but that can’t stop it from being one of the best movies ever made. As it turns out, I’ll be giving the award to two brownface movies in a row, and I do so reluctantly, but I just can’t deny them…

Directors: Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins
Writer: Ernest Lehman, based on the musical by Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents (and, of course, “Romeo and Juliet” by William Shakespeare)
Stars: Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, Russ Tamblyn, Rita Moreno, George Chakiris
The Story: The white Jets gang rumbles with the Puerto-Rican Sharks gang. Jets co-founder Tony falls in love with Maria, the sister of Sharks leader Bernardo. Bernardo kills the other co-founder Riff, so Tony kills Bernardo, then gets shot and killed by another shark, dying in Maria’s arms.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It also won Director(s), Supporting Actor for Chakiris, Supporting Actress for Moreno, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Editing, Scoring, and Sound. Only screenwriter Lehman lost (losing to Abby Mann for Judgment at Nuremberg)
How It Won: Not hard to figure this one out—It was a hit and universally acclaimed so it cruised to success.

 
Why It Won:

1. Wise got his start making lean little film noir masterpieces, usually about 75 minutes long, so he would seem to be a bizarre hire for a 2.5 hour Broadway adaptation, complete with intermission, but it was a brilliant choice. He hasn’t lost his noir grit, even when the gang members suddenly start doing pirouettes.
2. Sondheim fans are always horrified when I tell them that this is my favorite musical of his. “But he didn’t even write the music to that one!” Exactly. Don’t get me wrong, I love “Into the Woods”, “Company” and others, but as a composer, Sondheim was no Leonard Bernstein, and I cherish a chance to hear his delightful lyrics with even-better music.
3. I first saw this film while also watching “Twin Peaks”, which reunited Beymer and Tamblyn, and it took me years to realize that neither had worked very much in the thirty years between the two projects. I think that Beymer especially is great here and I have no idea why he didn’t become a star, instead laying around fallow until David Lynch finally rediscovered him.
   
4. This is my favorite film musical. Of every one I’ve seen this is the one where it’s most natural when the characters burst out into song and dance, because, while it’s a convincingly grimy world, everybody is supercharged with rhythm at all times. It almost feels unnatural when they manage to go a whole scene without a song or dance. When they’re not actually performing a song, they’re always snapping, or whistling or letting rhythm burst out of them in some other way.
   
5. We begin with the dancers on real NYC streets (the neighborhood where the musical was set had already been torn down to make room for Lincoln Center so they shot it in my old neighborhood of Spanish Harlem) then segue to massive and very convincing Hollywood sets in a seamless transition (and go back to real streets a few times to keep us convinced). The result is a type of hyper-reality: real but hallucinatory at the same time.
6. This does a great job with one of my rules: Always begin with discontented heroes. Tony and Maria both have longstanding personal problems, and then, when they meet, boom, they instantly ignite.

Ah, 1961: It begins…