Throughout the 1950s and particularly the 1960s there was a renaissance of big epic musicals, many of which went on to win Academy Award nominations or even the big prize of Best Picture themselves. While a handful of 60s Disney musicals have managed to take hold of my imagination, most notably Mary Poppins, a few big titles have somehow passed me by, including My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and, thankfully (so I hear), the original Doctor Dolittle. One that I also hadn’t seen that I was really looking forward to finally taking a look at was West Wide Story, starring Natalie Wood, and despite a little bit of slowness and repetition here and there, I enjoyed it immensely. The film cheats a little bit in the end with an ending that’s a little bit more Hollywood happy ending than William Shakespeare’s tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, but such a finale was to be expected. Robert Wise, who would next go on to direct a completely different kind of movie in The Haunting (!), blows through this material like a musical master, staging one ingenious number after another, with many of the songs being fairly memorable. The acting is all fine, and the rich colors of the cinematography burst out of the screen. West Side Story is no Singin’ in the Rain, but it’s a tremendously entertaining film that didn’t disappoint.