Veteran Hollywood craftsman Robert Wise directed 39 films from 1944 to 1989, establishing a reputation for proficiency in such a wide variety of genres as to cause some critics to say there is no Wise style. At the beginning of his career, he worked with equal facility in horror ("The Curse of the Cat People" 1944), film noir ("Born to Kill" 1947), Westerns ("Blood on the Moon" 1948), sports ("The Set-Up" 1949) and sci-fi ("The Day the Earth Stood Still" 1951), probably making his best films early on, before big budgets raised the stakes and made him a more cautious filmmaker. Still, you can't take those four Oscars away from him for directing and producing "West Side Story" (1961) and "The Sound of Music" (1965), and though critics may not have applauded, audiences approved his liberating the musicals from their stylized sets and taking them to the streets (and Alps).
In the decade that followed the Hoosier's arrival in Hollywood, Wise made a name for himself as an editor at RKO, earning an Oscar nomination for his work on Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" (1941) and even doing a little uncredited directing for Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons" (1942). An even greater influence than Welles on the young Wise was the producer Val Lewton who tapped him to take over for Gunther von Fritsch as director of the stylish horror picture "The Curse of the Cat People". Wise's first three directorial projects (also "Mademoiselle Fifi" 1944 and "Body Snatchers" 1945) were all under Lewton's aegis, and he benefited from his mentor's taste for literate material, psychological drama and the film noir style.
RKO finally gave Wise his first 'A' film budget for the ambitious Western "Blood on the Moon", starring Robert Mitchum, but it was his last film at RKO, the boxing feature "The Set-Up", that established him as a leading Hollywood talent. Praised for its uncompromising realism, the virtuoso editing of the fight sequences and the quasi- expressionistic reaction shots of the animalistic ringside crowd, "The Set-Up" won the Critics' Prize at Cannes but did not earn Wise a new contract with the studio. He departed for a three-year nonexclusive contract with 20th Century-Fox, where he helmed the landmark sci-fi classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still", making a serious statement in a genre without any tradition or respectability. Its story of an extraterrestrial emissary of peace (Michael Rennie) was blatantly anti-nuclear in the middle of the Cold War and a significant step in sci-fi's development away from the simple-mindedness of the past (i.e., the Buck Rogers serial).
Wise entered the MGM fold to direct the multifaceted tale of a company power struggle, "Executive Suite" (1954), the first of four collaborations with screenwriter Ernest Lehman that would also include the Academy Award-winning "West Side Story" and "The Sound of Music". He reteamed for the second time with Lehman on "Somebody Up There Likes Me" (1956), adapted from the autobiography of the middleweight boxing champion Rocky Graziano. Wise's biggest hit of the 50s offered an outstanding star turn by Paul Newman (in his second film role) plus noteworthy debuts by Steve McQueen and Robert Loggia and picked up an Oscar for Joseph Ruttenberg's photography. Wise earned his first Oscar nomination as Best Director for "I Want to Live!" (1958), a gritty prison drama about condemned criminal Barbara Graham, which did win Susan Hayward the statuette as Best Actress.
For the balance of his career, Wise continued to pursue a varied course, often returning to genres in which he had previously distinguished himself. In horror, many consider "The Haunting" (1963) the finest supernatural story of the 60s. He revisited sci-fi at the helm of "The Andromeda Strain" (1971) and "Star Trek--The Movie" (1979) and even trod once again in the very large footprints left by "West Side Story" and "The Sound of Music", faltering with "Star!" (1968) and "Rooftops" (1989), his last movie to date. Wise's thirst for diversity extended to his casts and crews. In a town where longtime associations are common, Wise never employed the same cinematographer more than twice, and that occurred on only eight occasions. In recognition of his body of work, the American Society of Cinematographers honored him with their Board of Directors Governors Award in 1997, and the American Film Institute presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award the following year. The honors may have been a bit premature, however, as Wise returned to the director's chair a final time for the 2000 Showtime remake of the TV-movie "A Storm in Summer." A popular and insightful interview subject for documentary projects on the actors and filmakers he worked with throughout his long career in the later years of his life, Wise dies in 2005 at age 91.