We here at Bombed Out in Space have decided to run a regular feature highlighting some of the world’s greatest underappreciated directors. The first director to be featured is a man responsible for at least three of the most iconic movies of their time: Robert Wise.
Ask anybody to name a film director from the 1940’s to 1960’s and names such as Hitchcock, Welles, Hawks, Ford and Kurosawa will be the most common responses. However, there is another filmmaker who excelled in this period and beyond who is rarely given the credit he deserves, a man who’s work won fifteen Oscars throughout his career, a man who won two best director Oscars; Robert Wise.
Wise is most well known for his two huge Oscar winning films West Side Story (1961) and The Sound Of Music (1965), but there is much more to his career than just those two films. In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, Robert Wise made his name as one of America’s brightest Horror and Science fiction directors with hits such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The House on Telegraph Hill (1951), The Curse of the Cat People (1944). However, Wise was never a filmmaker who wanted to be typecast as a Horror/Sci-fi director, throughout this period Wise was also making films within other genres such as Destination Gobi (1953); which told the story of a group of US Navy weathermen based in the Gobi desert who come under attack from the Japanese air force. In the same year Wise made another war picture, The Desert Rats, starring Richard Burton.
In addition to this impressive list of cinematic successes, Robert Wise is perhaps best known by Sci-Fi lovers around the world as the man who brought Star Trek to the big screen. It is difficult to understate how big an impact Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) made on the genre, the film was a critical and commercial phenomenon. Star Trek had already been a mainstay of television for thirteen years, so the anticipation for the film was huge, and this anticipation was a key factor in the film’s success, but it was not the only one. Another reason for the success of Star Trek was the experience that Wise brought to the production, and it is this experience and mastery of the directorial craft which helped Star Trek to become such a huge success.
Although Robert Wise’s achievement with these films was great he will forever be best remembered for West Side Story and The Sound of Music. With these movies Wise revolutionised the musical genre and inspired a generation of fans. Although West Side Story was a huge critical and commercial success it is The Sound of Music which has truly stood the test of time as a high watermark in the musical genre in particular. The greatest success of the film is the creation of one of the most iconic characters in all of cinema history; Julie Andrews’s Maria. She is one of the purest and most identifiable characters in all of film history and it is this very iconic characterisation which makes The Sound of Music the great movie that it is, and greatly enhances the stature of its director.
Over his long career Robert Wise has created iconic movies and characters, and has in addition to this put together an unrivalled body of work within the horror and science fiction genres. In short, Robert Wise is truly a one of the greatest filmmakers of his and any generation; who’s great contribution to American cinema between 1940 and 1980 cannot be understated.
