Natalie Wood STUNK in this film!

hired more for her fresh looks and right off Splendor in the Grass, she was a litle affected in this & self conscious, it was a great polished effort but yes Rita srtole the show.

I liked her performance for the most part but it was pretty uneven at times.

Esta es mi firma

Natalie Wood is PERFECT. In anything. Period.

To each their own, but I kind of liked Natalie Wood in the film version of West Side Story. I thought she did okay as Maria. As for Richard Beymer, well...given the fact that the Beymer-bashing really has gotten out of hand in some circles, I'm more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt than I previously was. Imho, directorial constraints put on him by Robert Wise, the way in which both the scripts for the original Broadway stage versions and the film versions of West Side Story had been written, and the fact that Natalie Wood showed such open hostility and resentment towards him during the filming of WSS (Natalie Wood actually did attempt to get Richard Beymer kicked off the set on several occasions!) all hampered him from playing an even stronger Tony with a bit more of an "edge".

As for George Chakiris's role as the Shark gangleader, Bernardo, I thought he was excellent and did a fabulous job playing Bernardo, and he wasn't effeminate at all, imho.

I wouldn't say Wood "stunk," but she was wooden and didn't really do anything special with the role and was miscast.

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Emojis=💩 Emoticons=

I've always thought that Natalie Wood was very good in a thankless role. The music,the dancing,the set design are all great, but in "West Side Story",Natalie Wood lingers in my memory.










Just because something can't be explained,doesn't mean it becomes yours!

Being Human

This whole film stinks.

I could not agree more with OP. In fact not just Natalie but this whole movie STUNK! I think people think she is a great actress because she died so early, lol. How stupid is that? Only people who are gonna love it are clueless teenagers with stupid dreams of getting married with a prince charming who looks like Richard or bored housewives who hate their husbands. I don't see any genuinely intelligent person who has grown to love the original play of Shakespeare finding it as anything less than travesty; thankfully the Bard didn't live to watch it. Morons posting here about how great this is should read the original play then watch Franco Zeffirelli's movie to see how Romeo and Juliet actually behaved (they certainly did not behave like numbskulls as they do in this movie).

I never liked Wood much anyhow, she did not even look like Juliet (Olivia Hussey did), and on top of that, she was so *beep* WOODEN in every movie she starred in - I guess she'd got a real good manager for herself who brought her such terrific roles even though she herself was, ironically, so terrible in them. And when such stinking pile of poop gets a rating of 8 on imbd, you can be confident that the country is *beep* Rita Moreno was the only good thing about this movie: she tried hard to bring a semblance of reality into this dumb movie. Oh and I have never heard more boring songs in my life; so far as musicals are concerned I would any day watch Wizard of Oz than this - at least Judy Garland sang her own songs (oh and she too died early, but was a much BETTER actress than the 'WOODEN' Wood)! All the while I basically TOLERATED (rather than enjoyed) this boring movie because I was waiting to stumble upon at least ONE clue that would tell me why this movie is rated so high here. Boy, was I disappointed!