ALTHOUGH he never quite became a household name like Hitchcock or Spielberg, Robert Wise was one of Hollywood's most successful film-makers.
He won four Oscars, as both director and producer of West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965), which set a record as the highest-grossing film of all time.
He directed drama, comedy, romance, crime, westerns and horror, steered StarTrek on to the big screen in 1979, and was editor of Citizen Kane (1941), the film that routinely tops polls for the greatest evermade.
However, Wise, who has died in Los Angeles, aged 91, has been given surprisingly little credit for such a remarkable body of work.
"There was a time when Wise was thought promising, "wrote critic David Thomson in a particularly mean-spirited entry in his Biographical Dictionary of Film. "But it is now clear that his better credits are only the haphazard products of artistic aimlessness given rare guidance."
Admittedly his Oscar successes were adaptations of Broadway hits and he shared his best directorOscar forWest Side Story with choreographer Jerome Robbins. But many Broadway hits have flopped on the big screen.
Robbins was meant to direct the musical numbers and Wise the remainder, but Wise took over the whole thing when the film fell behind schedule and the temperamental choreographerwas sacked.
Far from having Welles guide him on The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Wise was the guy who picked up the pieces when the boy genius fell out with RKO and disappeared off to South America. Wise shot extra scenes to link the re-edited footage together.
"In terms of a work of art, I grant you Orson's original film was better. But we were faced with the realities of what the studio was demanding, " said Wise, a self-effacing individual in an industry fuelled by hype, arrogance and ego. Even in its truncated form, cut from 148 minutes to 88, The Magnificent Ambersons is highly regarded by critics.
Wise has been the one who has brought guidance and discipline to the unwieldy work of others. He does not fit the auteur theory of film-making as the expression of a single artistic genius, but rather was a skilled craftsman who more easily fitted into the traditional Hollywood idea of film-making as a collective enterprise.
The very breadth of his output seems to have counted against Wise in the halls of critical opinion, which places greater value on the work of maverick visionaries, such as Welles, and directors, such as John Ford, who worked repeatedly within a single genre.
The son of a meatpacker, Wise was born in Winchester, Indiana, in 1914. As a boy, he went to the movies three or four times a week, though he intended to pursue a career in journalism. He dropped out of college during the Depression and got a job with RKO Studios, where his brotherwas working in the accounts department.
He was an established and respected editor by the time he worked with Welles on Citizen Kane. There is no doubt Welles was the visionary behind the film but, over the years, as the film's reputation grew, he seemed increasingly determined to take credit for every aspect, from script to editing. He did spend time in the cutting room, but even Welles's friends have questioned the extent of his contribution and acknowledged the credit due to Wise.
"Citizen Kane was not difficult to edit, " Wise said. "You would see those extraordinary dailies every day, the marvellous photography and angles and great scenes with actors that were new to the screen, and know it was quite special. And to think that Welles was 25.
"We would meet in the morning and again in the afternoon.
Then he would come in after shooting had wrapped and look at what I'd done and make the usual suggestions - 'Don't cut away that quickly from the close-up", that sort of thing."
Wise got the chance to direct The Curse of the Cat People (1944), when the original director Gunther von Fritsch was sacked. Wise was already on the film as editor. It was one of three films he made with Val Lewton, who is rightly regarded as an auteur-producer of wonderfully atmospheric horror films.
Wise also directed The Body Snatcher (1945), an adaptation of a Robert Louis Stevenson story, inspired by Burke and Hare and starring Boris Karloff.
Among his most highly-rated films critically are The Set-Up (1949), a drama about corruption in boxing; The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), a classic sci-fi story in which Man is given a warning from outer space about his future conduct;
and I Want to Live! (1958), for which Susan Hayward won an Oscar as a woman sentenced to death and Wise witnessed an execution as part of his research.
The combination of nuns and Nazis, Julie Andrews and some of Rodgers and Hammerstein's most sugary songs left some a little queasy, but there is no denying The Sound of Music became a cinematic phenomenon. It continues to excite loyal devotion (and feelings of antipathy) today.
Wise's career had plenty of misfires too, and he failed to repeat the success of The Sound of Music when he reunited with Andrews for the musical, Star!
(1968). 20th Century Fox was already reeling from the expense of Cleopatra and the failure of Star! helped bring the studio to the point of bankruptcy.
Other films included Helen of Troy (1956), Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), The Haunting (1963), The Sand Pebbles (1966), The Andromeda Strain (1971) and The Hindenburg (1975).
Wise served as president of both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Directors Guild of America and won numerous lifetime achievement awards, including the academy's highly prestigious Irving G Thalberg Memorial Award. He is survived by his second wife and two children.
Robert Wise, film director; born September 10, 1914, died September 14, 2005.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article