First called as assistant director to shoot additional scenes for Welles's
The Magnificent Ambersons, Wise took his first directing job with the stylish horror film
The Curse of the Cat People in
1944, teaming with Hollywood horror producer/director
Val Lewton, a collaboration which would produce several notable horror films, among them
The Body Snatcher starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, a film which in its acting direction deliberately evoked the groundbreaking horror films of the 1930s, while presenting a psychological horror film more in tune with the uncertainty of the 1940s.
In
1947, Wise directed the
Lawrence Tierney noir classic
Born to Kill and two years later directed the boxing movie
The Set-Up, where his direction of the real-time setting got him noticed. Wise's use and mention of time in this film would find echos in later
noir films such as Stanley Kubrick's
The Killing and Quentin Tarantino's
Pulp Fiction.
In the
1950s, Wise proved adept in several genres, from the
science fiction of
The Day the Earth Stood Still to the melodramatic
So Big, to Susan Hayward's Oscar winner in
I Want to Live!, for which he was nominated for
Best Director.
In
1961, teamed with
Jerome Robbins, he won the
Academy Award for Best Director for
West Side Story, which he also produced. He repeated this achievement in
1965 with
The Sound of Music.
The Sound of Music was an interim film for Wise, produced to mollify the studio while he developed the difficult film
The Sand Pebbles, starring
Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough and
Candice Bergen. Set in the late 1920s in
China, this was Wise's entry in a spate of
Vietnam war era films (
Catch-22,
M*A*S*H), which, though set in other periods of wartime, nevertheless sounded with its depictions of
gunboat diplomacy what would come to be recognized as
timeless themes. Wise would later speak of
The Sand Pebbles as the film he most wanted to direct, though he had earlier explored such anti-war themes in movies such as
The Day the Earth Stood Still.
In the 1970s he directed such films as
The Andromeda Strain,
The Hindenburg, the horror film
Audrey Rose, and the first
Star Trek film,
Star Trek: The Motion Picture. In 1989 he directed
Rooftops, his last theatrical feature film.
Even in his twilight years, Wise continued to be active in productions of DVD versions of his films, even making public appearances promoting those films.
Wise was a past president of both the
Directors Guild of America and the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He has a star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6338 Hollywood Blvd.
After suffering a
heart attack at home, Wise was rushed to
UCLA Medical Center, where he died from heart failure. He died on
14 September 2005, four days after his birthday.
rss feed