Robert Wise, the Oscar-winning director-producer of “West Side Story” and “The Sound of Music,” who died of heart failure Wednesday at 91, was a master of many movie genres in a career that spanned over half a century.
The filmmaker whom Martin Scorsese once called “the Steven Spielberg of his generation,” Wise was a solid, often ingenious craftsman/artist admired and revered among his colleagues for his ability to serve a movie’s material rather than flaunt his personality. But that seemingly self-effacing attitude produced an unusual number of movie classics.
In his 56-year directorial career Wise showed mastery in almost every genre but comedy. Whether he was directing a spectacular musical (“West Side Story”), a science-fiction fable (“The Day the Earth Stood Still”), a noir heist thriller (“Odds Against Tomorrow”), a horror film (“The Haunting”), a war epic (“The Desert Rats”) or a bio (“Somebody Up There Likes Me,” “I Want to Live!”), Wise invariably gave his audiences strong, intelligent stories with fine casts, made in a style that was flawlessly lucid.
That luminous clarity may owe much to his earlier training as a top film editor. Two Wise-directed movies are on the American Film Institute’s all-time Top 100 list: “West Side Story” (No. 41) and “The Sound of Music” (No. 55). But he has another on the list as editor: the poll-topper “Citizen Kane,” which the 26-year-old Wise edited for 25-year-old writer-director-star Orson Welles. It was his work on “Kane,” still hailed as among the most brilliantly cut films ever, that helped lead, in 1944, to his stellar directorial career.
Born Sept. 10, 1914, in Winchester, Ind., Wise was a four-movie-a-week buff in his youth who started as a sportswriter. But forced by the Depression to seek other employment, he wound up in Hollywood at RKO, starting as a film porter, then rising through the ranks to solo editor in 1939. In 1941, his editing of “Kane” persuaded Welles to rehire Wise for his next movie, 1942’s “The Magnificent Ambersons.” There, Wise’s role became more controversial. Panicky RKO executives, overreacting to a poor preview, ordered Wise, in Welles’ absence, to recut the film severely and to shoot new scenes to make sense of the confused result. Welles disowned the second cut. But Wise – who agreed that Welles’ version was superior – defended his work as needed to prevent worse studio butchery.
Two decades later, Wise had risen to the top of his profession with “West Side Story,” the great musical movie adapted from the Jerome Robbins-Leonard Bernstein stage classic.
In addition to his four Oscars for producing and directing “West Side Story” and “Sound of Music,” Wise’s many prizes included the Irving G. Thalberg Award (1966) from the Motion Picture Academy and the D.W. Griffith Award (1988) from the Directors Guild.
Master of many genres
A partial list of films directed by Robert Wise:
The Curse of the Cat People (1944)
Born to Kill (1947)
Blood on the Moon (1948)
The Set-Up (1949)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
Somebody Up There Likes Me (1957)
I Want to Live! (1958)
Run Silent, Run Deep (1958)
West Side Story (1961)
The Haunting (1963)
The Sound of Music (1965)
The Sand Pebbles (1966)
The Andromeda Strain (1971)
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
SOURCE: ALLMOVIE.COM
