Appreciation: Robert Wise

The standard critical line on director ROBERT WISE, who died last week in Los Angeles at 91, was that his films lacked personality, those visual signatures and obsessive themes that set true auteurs apart from studio hacks for hire. He also had the critical misfortune to direct the Oscar-winning Sound of Music, that melting pile of Alpine slush that was for a long time the most popular movie ever released. But Wise, who broke in as a film editor--earning praise for Orson Welles' Citizen Kane and unjustified calumny for recutting The Magnificent Ambersons after Welles abandoned it--mastered over the years every imaginable movie genre and made at least half a dozen pictures that are among the best of their breed, including The Set-Up, a tragic boxing tale whose running time matched the time elapsed in the story; a tough-as-nails noir, Born to Kill; and the sublime sci-fi masterpiece The Day the Earth Stood Still. In those films, as in his other Oscar winner, West Side Story, in which his camera was a fully choreographed partner with Jerome Robbins' dancers, his impeccable and unpretentious craftsmanship became the true assertion of a modest, subtle and humane temperament. He became a revered Hollywood elder and president of the Directors Guild and the Motion Picture Academy, which he managed as he did his sets--with a quiet intelligence that in an ego-driven industry was the more welcome for its invisibility. --By Richard Schickel