Robert Wise

Veteran American filmmaker Robert Wise died in Los Angeles on September 14, 2005, at the age of 91, due to heart failure. Wise was about to receive a tribute at the San Sebastian Festival, but he wasn’t feeling well, so his wife, Patricia Doyle, known as Millicent, went to the contest alone. As soon as she arrived in the city of San Sebastian, she found out the news of the death of her husband and she was forced to return quickly.

Robert Wise was born in Winchester, Indiana, in 1914. At age 19, due to the Great Depression, he was forced to drop out of school to look for a job. Passionate about cinema, he managed to get his brother, who worked as an accountant at the mythical production company RKO, to plug him into the company. In this way he got a contract as an assistant in the assembly department. But Wise learned quickly, and little by little he rose through the ranks, until they let him be the head of the editing of various films, including Esmeralda, la gypsy and the mythicalCitizen Kane , by Orson Welles . So satisfied was Welles with his work that he returned to count on him for his second film,The fourth commandment , but the production company wanted to control Welles after his first job failed at the box office, forcing Robert Wise to eliminate a large number of scenes and shoot a happy ending. In this way, the film was unrecognizable, and it is difficult to follow it until the end, since it seems to be made up of isolated sequences, spaced out in time.

The immense prestige that Robert Wise accumulated made the production company bet on him, and thus he made his directorial debut with Revenge of the Panther Woman , a bland sequel to Jacques Tourneur ‘s horror classic . Over the next few years, Wise proved his worth across all genres. He shot great westerns, such as Blood on the Moon , and a magnificent drama, I Want to Live , a tough plea against capital punishment for which the leading lady, Susan Hayward , was awarded an Oscar . Robert Wise is also the author of great boxing movies like Nobody Can Beat Me andMarked by Hate , which inspired Scorsese when he filmedwild bull . He did not stop shooting war films ( Las ratas del desierto ), epic mega-productions (Helen of Troy ) and even catastrophic cinema ( Hindenburg ). In horror movies, Robert Wise moved like a fish to water, since his forays into the genre left their mark, especially for The Corpse Snatcher , The Haunted House andThe Two Lives of Audrey Rose . And for fans of science fiction, Wise is a true myth, author of a cult B series, as she is the pacifistUltimatum on Earth , from the exciting adaptation of Michael Crichton ‘s novel The Andromeda Strain and the first film installment ofStar Trek , which he gave a 2001-esque air of transcendence to even though it came from a rather tacky TV series.

Robert Wise’s greatest successes were obtained in the musical field. first withThe Sound of Music and Tears , the true story of the Von Trapp family, who had to flee Austria with the arrival of the Nazis. Full of songs with a cheesy touch, like ‘Do, Re, mi’, but unforgettable, and with a sentimental story that couldn’t be more sentimental, of a romance between a governess and a widowed army officer, the truth is that Robert Wise managed to convert that material in an essential classic of the genre. even better isWest Side Story , co-directed with choreographer Jerome Robbins , who was ultimately fired by the production company. It was a modern version of “Romeo and Juliet,” where the age-old hatred between two Verona families turned into a story of racial hatred between two rival gangs on the streets of New York. The songs, by maestro Leonard Bernstein , remain to be remembered. For these two titles, Robert Wise received four Oscars, corresponding to best director and best film, since Wise was also a producer on both.

Wise remained unknown to the general public throughout his life, despite the fact that films like The Yangtze on Fire were sweeping the billboards. He just failed miserably withThe star , which was a serious obstacle to continue his career. Robert Wise continued shooting until relatively recently, since in 2000 he directed the TV movie Summer Storm , starring Peter Falk and Nastassja Kinski , which was his last job. It tells the story of a father who lost his son in the war, and who has to take care of a colored child for a while. As the filmmaker commented, he did not like current cinema too much. “Too much violence and special effects”, he declared in 1994, when he was at the San Sebastián Festival, to act as president of the jury.