Wise Showed Us the Face of Human Emotions

If you define great films as those with significant themes that successfully entertain millions of people around the world, then an astonishing number of films directed by Robert Wise qualify.

And if you describe a great filmmaker as one who adds to technical mastery an ability to tell a wide variety of stories with both visual economy and respect for his audience--and whose works humanize us by showing recognizable human feelings--then the catalog of Wise films marks him as a great filmmaker.

As editor, he contributed greatly to “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1939), “My Favorite Wife” (1940), “Dance, Girl, Dance” (1940) and “Citizen Kane” (1941), for which he turned miles of film into a coherent narrative.

Wise began his long and prestigious directing career when RKO producer Val Lewton asked him to take over “The Curse of the Cat People” in 1944--and made it a richly complex tale of childhood fears and fantasies that can endure into adulthood. Here, as in every film thereafter, Wise went deeper than mere analysis: He takes us to the level of feeling, hence to a new way of understanding ourselves and others.

He also turned thrillers like “A Game of Death” and “The Body Snatcher” (both released in 1945) into allegories about the primacy of human life.

One of his acknowledged masterpieces, “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951), has become a classic, admired universally by filmmakers and audiences. At first, it seems to be a scary science-fiction thriller; then it turns wry and acute, and finally it’s a warm and ennobling parable that takes a firm stand against the nuclear arms race.

It’s interesting to note that here as elsewhere, the special effects in a Wise film are used only when absolutely necessary, and then they’re kept to a minimum; instead, we watch human characters cope with life. Somehow they muddle through, and we recognize their fear and frailties as to some extent our own, too.

No doubt this is why, in the lovely final scene of “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” we’re moved by the hint of smiles on the faces of Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal.

A few words of this movie’s dialogue--part of an alien language concocted for certain scenes of the story--have worked their way into our national popular heritage. Despite her terror that she may be killed by Gort’s fearsome death ray, Patricia Neal saves the world by gazing straight at the robot as she manages to get out the words Klaatu has instructed: “Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!” We know that she means something like: “Gort, Klaatu says, ‘NO!’ “--”No” to destroying her, the world and everything in it.

In 1951, the U.S. government refused to help with the preparation of certain scenes in “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” nor would it approve the script. The country was firmly in the grip of Cold War smugness, and the movie was blunt in its preference for peace over war. Sen. Joseph McCarthy and company were prowling the country, seeking whom they might devour. It wasn’t the last time a film by Wise showed us the dangerous path we were taking, where we were, the direction we needed to consider, and what we needed to look out for.

With enormous gentleness as his greatest strength and with obvious love for types like this, Wise evokes rich depths from this simple moral fable--a trait that helps explain why young actors (those in “Curse of the Cat People,” “West Side Story” [1961], “The Sound of Music” [1965] and “Audrey Rose” [1977], for example) and older actors (like Burgess Meredith and Peggy Wood) loved working in his films. He has a knack for sensing in advance how scenes play, how lines read, how people look, perceive, react.

Wise came back to the realm of the uncanny and the dreadful later, in his profoundly unsettling thriller “The Haunting” (1963), and he continued to take us to the frontiers of the mysterious in “The Andromeda Strain” (1971), which makes a strong statement against biological warfare.

Where there’s a moral sensibility in Wise’s films, it comes from what the director has called “the foreground”--the situation, the characters, the story itself. It’s also in the way he treats the story--in what he shows us, not what he tells us.

Might, for example, never makes right--not even in “Somebody Up There Likes Me” (1956), which celebrates not so much boxing but the courage to transcend oneself by love, against all odds.

A pioneer as well as a man of principle, Wise routinely tackles controversy. “The Set-Up” (1949) shows us that what we call sport is often just thinly disguised blood lust; “Odds Against Tomorrow” (1959) indicts racism itself as a crime; and “I Want to Live!” (1958) condemns capital punishment. Killing, says the picture, never justifies killing.

When it’s necessary, and with no concession to the sentimentalists, the films of Wise look evil squarely in the face and call it evil. They also call revenge inhuman and vengeance dehumanizing. “The Sand Pebbles” (1966), for another example (a picture that seems more provocative each year), remains a fierce indictment of American imperialism. Set in China in 1926, it’s a frank reproach to complacent Yankee arrogance--the sort of attitude that gave us the Vietnam War, raging when Wise made the picture.

He is equally at home in giving us wonderfully textured stories about city life and tales of country life. “Criminal Court” (1946), “Born to Kill” (1947), “The House on Telegraph Hill” (1951) and “The Captive City” (1952) are like maps of the human heart, and the topography is that of any street or lane. Everywhere, there’s the kind of greedy compression that leads to madness and death. These are not movies about all of life, but they do show us what some of life is like and what all of life is in constant danger of becoming. These concerns are evident in his rousing westerns, too--in “Blood on the Moon” (1948) and “Tribute to a Bad Man” (1956).

And then there are those marvelous musicals--the whimsy of “This Could Be the Night” (1957), the steely poignancy of “West Side Story,” the honest heroics of “The Sound of Music” and the sly dash of “Star!” (1968), which is at last being reassessed as a first-rate dramatic musical.

Wise won two Oscars apiece for producing and directing the best pictures of 1961 and 1965: “West Side Story” (co-directed by Jerome Robbins) and “The Sound of Music.” In both cases, as usual, he insists that the praise belongs as well to his cast and, perhaps preeminently, to his scenarists. Among the great screenplay writers who gave so memorably to Wise’s inventory: Robert Anderson, William Fairchild, Nelson Gidding, Ernest Lehman, Isobel Lennart and Edmund H. North.

What sticks in the memory, of course, is those images--not merely the right shots but the telling scenes that leave you gasping: the anguished pride on Paul Newman’s battered face in “Somebody Up There Likes Me”; the muted exuberance of Julie Andrews in the touching early sequences of “The Sound of Music”; the angular benevolence of Michael Rennie in “The Day the Earth Stood Still”; the sense of nettled fear on the faces of Julie Harris and Claire Bloom in “The Haunting”; the subtext of gentleness beneath the bruised cynicism of Steve McQueen in “The Sand Pebbles.”

No wonder that, among eight personal nominations and five Academy Awards for his films, he received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial for “the most consistently high level of production achievement by an individual producer.” As Wise has always known and shown us, the real story lies not in the laser guns or the computer lab, but in the infinite gradations of emotion that gather on the human face and reveal us to one another.

This Wise man has brought us gold.