It's hard to look at West Side Story today and not be totally impressed. It's a great movie best seen projected instead of screened on videotape, laser disk or DVD although I'd heartily recommend it to anyone interested in movies.

Part of the film's greatness lay in its lush production value inhabiting every frame with care and conscious design. The color palette creates a highly impressionistic urban world of ethnic conflict and '50s stylization in dress and speech all the time creating symbols through the use of city spaces. Sound burns through set pieces with music cascading off every sidewalk and character yearning for expression within the smoldering West Side setting. Then there's Leonard Bernstein's score, Stephen Sondheim's lyrics, mind-blowing dance routines and the literally overlarge tableau provided by the use of a Panavision 70 camera with its widescreen aspect ratio.

If nothing else Robert Wise's production was careful to assemble all of the very best human and technical resources for the Ernest Lehman adaptation of Arthur Laurents's play of the same name. Necessarily this assembly must single-out Jerome Robbins, that legendary Broadway choreographer and director, who was enlisted as the film's co-director and choreographer to best carry off its numerous spectacles of dance and song like "America", "Maria" and "Something's Coming."

As a modernization of "Romeo and Juliet" sent through the stage musical form, West Side Story is a movie hybrid filled with music and movement, emotion and reaction, romance and social significance. Combining the well-known Shakespearean tragedy with burning commentary the film is also an analogy for geopolitical affairs haunting the world scene in 1961.

The story's rival gangs symbolize teenage angst while also being an echo of Cold War tensions, including the arms race and its concomitant escalation in killing power. The central lovers symbolize youthful innocence and the charm of hopeful idealism though their utopia is at once limited through a lack in foresight to ensure its realization beyond lovely daydreams. Likewise the few adult characters in the film demonstrate their bias against a vigorous youth culture that's easily written off as being callous even though this supposedly wild demographic was itself born into a world already built on such callousness. Characters throughout act out the drama of love and hate and strive, innocently enough, towards happiness despite circumstances that frequently provide dissatisfaction.

Opening with an overture played to abstract titles resolving into a photograph of the Manhattan skyline, the film begins as a city symphony. Subsequent cuts move across streets and avenues in overhead shots observing the urban landscape. Settling on a blacktop park the film's narrative then begins with the snapping fingers of a white youth gang called the Jets.

At the gang's center is Riff (Russ Tamblyn), a Euro-mutt and second generation American, who leads his straggly crew through the streets of Manhattan's West Side asserting their right to territory. Opposite them is the Puerto Rican gang, the Sharks, led by the handsome and equally prepossessing Bernardo (George Chakiris). Both groups want dominance over the playgrounds, sidewalks, tenement walkways and gymnasium spaces that dapple their teenage dystopia so when the Jets and Sharks tangle to a standstill, Riff lobbies his old friend Tony (Richard Beymer) for help.

Issuing a challenge to rumble at a neighborhood dance, Tony first sees Bernardo's younger sister from across the room. Maria (Natalie Wood) fills him with love only to begin a romance that's horribly complicated by mounting tensions with their conflict-laden world.

As Riff and Bernardo agree to terms for a street fight, Tony and Maria further pursue one another in neighborhood shadows while the gangs find themselves policed by Lieutenant Schrank (Simon Oakland) and his toady, Officer Krupke (William Bramely). Tensions mount before the Jets and Sharks rumble when Maria asks Tony to stop the fight.

Naturally both gangs ignore his entreaties for peace as the fistfight turns into a balletic knife duel. Bernardo stabs Riff and is then killed by Tony in a vengeful pique over his best friend's death. The resulting free-for-all breaks up with Schrank and Krupke's arrival on scene that scatters the gangs leaving Tony criminally responsible for the death of his true love's brother.

Matters escalate as both gangs gear up for another rumble while Tony and Maria burrow into a lover's vigil spent planning their future together. In the end, though, Tony is shot by one of Bernardo's cronies and dies in Maria's arms as the Jets and Sharks crowd around her, shocked and pained by the conflict that has engulfed them all.

Budgeted at $6 million West Side Story went on to gross $43 million domestically and very nearly swept the Oscars ceremony of 1962. With 10 of 11 of its nominations resulting in statuettes the lone loser was Ernest Lehman, the film's screenwriter who was presumably consoled by a long and notable career, if not the official Academy sanction.

West Side Story's co-nominees for the Best Motion Picture Academy Award were Fanny, The Guns of Navarone, The Hustler and Judgment at Nuremberg. Its box office take was impressive though not so fantastic as Disney's 101 Dalmatians that grossed $144 million to set a high mark for animated features. Still, as a more adult and less family-centered film, for its two and a half hour length if not its overall message of tolerance, West Side Story was a terrific investment and has since becoming one of the bedrock movies in American history.

In 1961 the American movie-going public was also treated to a breath of cinematic revolution that was then originating in foreign waters. There was the release of Jean Luc Godard's Breathless, Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura and Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, each of which hit their mark within a burgeoning art cinema and catapulted the directors into international acclaim largely on their recognition in the United States.

It would be too much to say that Godard, Antonioni and Kurosawa owe their brilliance and reputation solely to the warm reception of their films of 1961. However, it is true to say that their particular excellence somehow channeled the fruits of their national contexts in such a way as to make them global film artists rather than regional characters of artistic significance. In short, Godard's association with the French New Wave, Antonioni's with Neorealism and Kurosawa's with post-War Japanification that yielded the economic turnaround of his native country were all filmmakers working in national film movements that matured in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

To say Godard, Antonioni and Kurosawa were the only participants in these flowing global waves of film production would be wrong. They were, however, some of the better known names associated with movies during the period, not to mention subsequent work where they emerged as world figures in cinema.

To likewise believe West Side Story was the single keynote of movie art the world over for the year 1961 would be equally shortsighted. That the Oscar was awarded to Wise's musical production and adaptation of one of Shakespeare's more famous plays is justified. It's even necessary when reviewing the film today only to be blown away by its unyielding artistic integrity and inspired dance and song routines. But it's equally important to remember that while this Natalie Wood vehicle may have inspired a generation there were other countries then establishing movie cultures with filmmakers of unknown potential transmitting work through the rest of the world for the very first time in history.

We are all the children of these figures in space and time just as we are the disciples of America's melting pot as depicted in West Side Story. Our luck is in being able to selectively review history's artifacts to seek new challenge in what interests us as well as in what appeals to our changing sense of art and entertainment.

Thankfully West Side Story is among our treasures. It's also one of our legacies since it very presciently centers not only on the undeniable fury of young love but also on the criminal problems associated with diverse populations falling into conflict with one another. By not shying away from these issues, but in fact making them the centerpiece of its spectacle, West Side Story is a vibrant social comment on the late '50s that's surprisingly modern even now that we're firmly entered into the early twenty-first century.

See this movie. Not just because I've urged you to but also because it's a rare treat for the senses. Every sequence features dance, song, youth and beauty, all with the terrible toll of pending tragedy hovering above hopeful optimism like raindrops falling to earth.

It's not a bad way to spend the afternoon, especially when considering the alternative pictures currently in release on theater screens across the country.