The Guardian
Ronald Bergan www.theguardian.com
<b>Obituary: </b>Industrious and versatile film director whose work ranged from sci-fi and horror to The Sound of Music.
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the Guardian
Leaping from genre to genre, from style to style, in a workmanlike manner, Robert Wise, who has died aged 91, became one of Hollywood's leading directors. Although he did so without much consistency or imposing any discernible personality on his films, he directed among the finest boxing dramas (The Set-Up, 1949), sci-fi movies (The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951), and horror pictures (The Body Snatcher, 1945).

Ironically, for a director whose most celebrated film was The Sound of Music (1965), shot in the Tyrolean hills in splendid Todd-AO and De Luxe Color, Wise's forte was for gritty, economically made, black-and-white realistic dramas. Unfortunately, among the myriad devotees of Orson Welles, Wise has forever been cast as the man who, in the editing room, diminished, if not destroyed, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) while the master's back was turned.

Born in Winchester, Indiana, Wise was the son of a meatpacker and his wife. He had to abandon his college journalism studies because of the depression, and, at the age of 19, he headed for Hollywood. His brother worked as an accountant at RKO, and got him a messenger's job in the editing department there. After picking up sound effects and music editing skills, Wise became an assistant editor. In a few years, he had become one of the studio's top editors and was assigned to assist Welles on Citizen Kane (1941). Only a year older than Welles, he had acquired a wealth of experience in cutting films, and was indispensable to the debutant film director, his editing making a significant contribution to the film's artistic success.

Especially effective was the newsreel, News on the March, in which he simulated archive film footage drawn from many periods; in some cases, he even scratched the film deliberately by dragging it over the cement floor of the editing room. Wise's bold editing is also distinguished in the famous sequence in which Kane's marriage is encapsulated in three continuous breakfast scenes, spread over several years as the couple drift further apart.

A year later, while Welles was working on It's All True in Brazil, he left Wise to assemble the final footage of The Magnificent Ambersons back in Hollywood. The film was over budget, over schedule and over long, and the RKO bosses insisted it be cut down after preview audiences became restless and impatient, and the majority of opinion cards were unfavourable.

Wise cabled Welles in Brazil: "The picture does seem to bear down on people." Welles replied that he would only make cuts if Wise came to Rio with the print. The studio refused, and Wise and his assistant, the future director Mark Robson, found themselves holed up in a motel, working day and night to keep the audiences in the theatres. The picture was cut from 132 minutes to 88, with scenes transposed or replaced in order to make the story tighter, speedier and clearer. Wise later said: "Since Ambersons has become something of a classic, I think it's now apparent we didn't mutilate Orson's film." Unfortunately, Welles accused Wise and others involved in the "desecration" of betrayal. Only those who saw the original version can judge whether it would have been even more magnificent without Wise's editing.

Wise, like Robson, started as a director making chillers for Val Lewton. When the low-budget RKO producer became dissatisfied with the work of Gunther von Fritsch on the dreamlike Curse of the Cat People (1944), he replaced him with Wise, who was editing the film. Though he shared the credit with Von Fritsch, Wise directed most of this tale of terror, whose title had little to do with the film.

The Body Snatcher was an admirable recreation of the Robert Louis Stevenson story, with Boris Karloff supplying corpses to doctor Henry Daniell (one of the suave, thin-lipped actor's best roles). The ending has Daniell imagining a corpse with Karloff's face, rhythmically repeating, "You'll never get rid of me" to the sound of the coach.

Wise went on to make a number of tightly constructed, suspenseful dramas such as A Game of Death (1946), the remake of The Most Dangerous Game, Born to Kill (1947), in which the hit man's ambition is to "fix it so's I can spit in anybody's eye", and an excellent, atmospheric Robert Mitchum western, Blood on the Moon (1948).

The Set-Up, a compelling metaphysical contemplation well suited to the angst of the boxing melodrama, was staged entirely at night and took place during the 72 minutes running time of the film. Robert Ryan, hitherto known as a menacing figure, reached a tragic dimension as a third-rate fighter who still feels the heavyweight championship is just "one punch away".

Freelancing on leaving RKO in 1950, Wise directed (for 20th Century Fox) the intelligent, non-stentorian anti-war sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, with Michael Rennie as an alien who arrives in Washington with the warning that unless nuclear weapons are destroyed, his people will annihilate the Earth. Then came a range of competent war films (Destination Gobi, The Desert Rats, both 1953), melodramas (So Big, 1953, and Executive Suite, 1954), epics (Helen of Troy, 1956) and westerns (Tribute to a Bad Man, 1956, starring James Cagney, stepping in for Spencer Tracy, whom Wise fired for turning up on set six days late.)

Better was Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), a biopic of Rocky Graziano (with Paul Newman in a role originally meant for James Dean). The movie's celebration of professional boxing as part of the American dream was almost a direct riposte to the Set-Up. Despite this, it was directed in an energetic and entertaining manner with enough atmosphere to conjure up New York's East Side in the MGM studio.

In Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), Wise sustained the claustrophobic underwater tensions on a submarine, and controlled the profile-to-profile confrontation between Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster. The main wallop packed by Wise's clinically realistic direction of I Want to Live! (1958), with Oscar-winning Susan Hayward as a woman executed for murder, was the long final sequence as she prepares for death, and the scene in the gas chamber.

West Side Story (1961) opened with the famous helicopter shot of Manhattan, the camera zooming in on finger-snapping youths. However, because the shooting on location on West 64th Street only emphasised the unreality of a gang dancing balletically down the streets, the Panavision 70 Technicolor film moved on to the sound stages. Wise succeeded in controlling this awkward mixture of realism, social comment, opera, ballet and showbiz. He and the choreographer Jerome Robbins, who received a co-director's credit though he left the film early, shared the best director Oscar, with Wise also receiving the best picture award as producer.

Wise took the same two awards (producer of best picture, and best director) for The Sound of Music, the Broadway musical which he opened up brilliantly. The Rodgers and Hammerstein songs, the eyecatching use of the scenery around Salzburg and Julie Andrews' hygienic performance helped make it a chocolate box-office hit.

After tripping lightly over the hills, Andrews and Wise fell flat on their faces with Star! (1968), an old-hat biopic of Gertie Lawrence. He had done better with the protracted Steve McQueen naval war movie, The Sand Pebbles (1966), but for the rest of his career he doggedly plied his way down the Hollywood mainstream, moving from sci-fi (The Andromeda Strain, 1971) to disaster movie (The Hindenburg, 1975) to the occult (Audrey Rose, 1977) and back to sci-fi with Star Trek: the Motion Picture (1979), which became the fourth biggest earner in Paramount's history.

Immediately afterwards, Wise decided to give up directing, and stick to producing. Sadly, he was tempted back in 1989 with Rooftops, an urban B-musical about an American boy who falls in love with a Hispanic girl, which tried to recapture the days when he was riding high with West Side Story.

He is survived by his second wife, Millicent, and a son from his first marriage.