West Side Story (1961)

Directed by Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise

Starring Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, Russ Tamblyn, George Chakiris, Rita Moreno, Simon Oakland, Ned Glass, William Bramley, Tucker Smith, Tony Mordente, David Winters, Eliot Field, Bert Michaels, David Bean, Robert Banas, and Susan Oakes

The first of four musicals to win Best Picture in the 1960s, West Side Story is one of the better movie musicals to come out of Hollywood. The reason for this seems to be that they combined the best of Broadway and Hollywood. Most movie musicals that fail do so for one of two reasons: having no one that knows about musical theatre or having no one that knows about film. This film solved that by hiring two directors: Jerome Robbins, legendary Broadway director and choreographer in his only film job, and Robert Wise, a well established film director who would go on to musical success again with 1965's The Sound of Music. These two minds came together to meld the two art forms into one excellent film. Robbins had directed and choreographed the Broadway show, and transfered a lot of the magic from that production to the screen. West Side Story is the finest example from a golden era of Broadway musical film adaptations.

Other nominees: Fanny (Joshua Logan), The Guns of Navarone (J. Lee Thompson and Alexander Mackendrick), The Hustler (Robert Rossen), and Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer)