Saw in the paper today that veteran movie director Robert Wise died on Wednesday of heart failure after being rushed to the hospital. He had just celebrated his 91st birthday the previous Saturday and had seemed in good health.
Wise helmed two of the most popular musicals of all time, West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965). Sci-fi film buffs will best remember Wise as director of the classics The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and The Andromeda Strain (1971). Horror fans will remember Wise for the cult favorite The Haunting (1963) - which was a personal favorite of his as well. And for myself, I will remember Wise as the man behind Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), which I staunchly defend as the best Trek feature film ever made, and one of the greatest sci-fi films ever.Robert Wise was a storyteller who excelled in many movie genres and twice received an Academy Award as best director. In a long career in which he became a notable editor of such films as Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, he went from making B-movies at RKO Studios during Hollywood's golden era of the 1940s to making some of its most important postwar films.
Mr. Wise considered himself a director of content, not messages, and he was not afraid to experiment. In 1959, he filmed Odds Against Tomorrow, an anti-racist drama with Harry Belafonte and Robert Ryan about a brutal robbery, that he made without the usual fades (going to black) or dissolves (overlapping scenes) to denote the passage of time. Fades and dissolves, he remarked, tend to slow the tempo and break the mood.
Despite Mr. Wise's versatility, dedication and skill at drawing consistently superior performances from actors, reviewers tended to complain that he left no personal stamp on his films and dismissed him as a sentimental technician.
"I'd rather do my own thing, which has been to choose projects that take me into all different kinds of genres," he once told the Associated Press. "I don't have a favorite kind of film to make. I just look for the best material I can find."
Farewell, Mr. Wise, and thank you for giving us movies that matter.A particular admirer of Mr. Wise's editing skills was Martin Scorsese, the director who was instrumental in getting him the American Film Institute's lifetime achievement award in 1998. "His films became increasingly fascinating to me because of the editing style, a very crisp, clear style of editing that kind of points the audience toward where to look in a scene," Mr. Scorsese said.
Mr. Wise's big break came when Gunther von Fritsch fell behind schedule in directing The Curse of the Cat People (1944), a children's terror fantasy that starred Simone Simon. Mr. Wise, who was editing it, was assigned to take over direction and completed shooting in 10 days. The film became a cult classic, and Mr. Wise was promoted to director. He believed that actors had a special language of their own, and, with typical diligence, enrolled in an acting class to learn how performers viewed moviemaking. For the next three decades, he emerged as one of the most prolific and peripatetic filmmakers in Hollywood.
