Robert Wise

Robert Wise (born September 10, 1914, Winchester, Indiana, U.S.—died September 14, 2005, Los Angeles, California) was an American movie director and producer whose many works include successful films of nearly every genre, though he is best remembered for the two musicals for which he won Academy Awards as best director, West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965). Demonstrating an unusual flexibility that surpassed any lack of a consistent style or theme, Wise was an efficient master craftsman who was first and foremost committed to conveying a thoroughgoing sense of reality in his films.

Early life and work

Wise grew up in Connersville, Indiana, and in 1931 enrolled at nearby Franklin College to study journalism, but the Great Depression curtailed his education. In 1933 he went to Hollywood and began working in the film-shipping room at RKO Studios, where his brother was an accountant. After serving as a sound, music, special-effects, and assistant editor, he rose to the rank of full editor in 1939, working on such films as Bachelor Mother (1939), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), and My Favorite Wife (1940). Most famously, he edited Citizen Kane (1941), for which he received an Academy Award nomination, and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), which he significantly reedited (and for which he directed an additional scene) after RKO had taken that feature film out of director Orson Welles’s hands.

Wise got his chance to direct when producer Val Lewton needed a replacement director for The Curse of the Cat People (1944), which was running behind schedule. The result was an eerie, touching film about a young girl dangerously prone to fantasizing.

Films of the mid- to late 1940s

Wise stayed with Lewton’s filmmaking unit for two more films: Mademoiselle Fifi (1944), a loose adaptation of a pair of stories by Guy de Maupassant that focused on a courageous laundress (Simone Simon) who frees her French village from the spectre of the Prussian invaders during the Franco-German War, and The Body Snatcher (1945), a superior short-schedule, low-budget B-film based on a Robert Louis Stevenson story about a doctor (Henry Daniell) who hires a grave robber (Boris Karloff) to supply him with cadavers for his experiments. Like most of Wise’s films in the genre, that minor classic of the macabre relies on understated psychological suspense rather than gratuitous gore and shock for its effect.

Wise’s next two efforts were unexceptional: A Game of Death (1945), a formulaic remake of RKO’s The Most Dangerous Game (1932), and Criminal Court (1946), a dull mystery. Born to Kill (1947), though, was something special, a pitiless film noir in which tough-guy Lawrence Tierney played a sociopathic killer who tries to marry his way into respectability.

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Wise’s growing reputation for an insistence upon accuracy and realism was epitomized in the memorable barroom brawl between leading actors Robert Mitchum and Robert Preston in the moody film-noirish western Blood on the Moon (1948). Mystery in Mexico (1948) was a standard detective tale, but Wise’s follow-up, The Set-Up (1949), is widely considered to be both an essential film noir and one of the greatest boxing films ever made. Robert Ryan’s portrayal of an over-the-hill prizefighter who refuses to take a dive and pays a frightful price for his decision is a tour de force. Throughout his career Wise was convinced that a director had to “know” his subject matter, and in preparation for The Set-Up he frequented shabby fight arenas to photograph and observe boxers and their fans. Shooting in real time—the 72-minute running time matches the amount of fictional time that elapses—also added to the sense of authenticity of the film, which, counterintuitively, was based on a long narrative poem by Joseph Moncure March. With The Set-Up, Wise had his first major success with the critics, and, despite the later box-office blockbusters for which he would be better known, many critics and film historians still consider it to be his finest motion picture.

Films of the 1950s

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By the 1950s Wise was well established as a reliable, competent director who finished films on schedule, including Two Flags West (1950), a formulaic American Civil War story; Three Secrets (1950), a suspenseful soap opera; and The House on Telegraph Hill (1951), a noirish espionage tale. The next significant work in his oeuvre, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), unlike most science-fiction films of that period, was an “A” production, with a considerable budget and strong cast that included Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, and Sam Jaffe. It also featured an evocative score by Bernard Herrmann and a philosophical screenplay by Edmund North with a subtext drenched in the dread of nuclear war—all of which contributed to the belief among many film historians that The Day the Earth Stood Still was the preeminent science-fiction movie of the decade.

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A clutch of lesser works followed: The Captive City (1952), a small independent production focused on a crusading newspaper editor; Something for the Birds (1952), which concerned Washington, D.C., lobbyists; The Desert Rats (1953), a sequel to Henry Hathaway’s The Desert Fox (1951), with James Mason repeating his role as German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel; Destination Gobi (1953), another World War II drama; and So Big (1953), an adaptation of Edna Ferber’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. One of Wise’s best-received films of the decade was Executive Suite (1954), the chronicle of a cutthroat power struggle at a furniture company. It featured a large distinguished cast (including William Holden, Fredric March, Barbara Stanwyck, Walter Pidgeon, June Allyson, and Shelley Winters ) and several subplots, the various strands of which were shrewdly woven together by Wise.

Helen of Troy (1956) is notable only for an early appearance by French actress Brigitte Bardot. This Could Be the Night and Until They Sail (both 1957) starred Jean Simmons in a comedy and a drama, respectively. More interesting were the western Tribute to a Bad Man (1956), with James Cagney, and Somebody up There Likes Me (1956), a charming biography of one-time world middleweight boxing champion Rocky Graziano, who is appealingly portrayed by Paul Newman.

Moving to United Artists, Wise made the suspenseful submarine-warfare drama Run Silent, Run Deep (1958) with Burt Lancaster and Clark Gable before attracting more attention with I Want to Live! (1958), in which Susan Hayward earned the only Academy Award of her career (for best actress) for her portrayal of a haughty hard-boiled prostitute who is seemingly railroaded into a death sentence. The academy also honoured Wise with his first nomination for best director. His last project of the decade, Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), was a noirish caper film that also explored racism.