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Acknowledgements
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(1914– ). American director.
Edited: The Hunchback of
Notre Dame (Pandro S. Berman 1939); The
Devil and Daniel Webster (William Dieterle 1941).
Acted in: The Stupids
(John LANDIS 1996).
As someone who worked his way
up through the old studio system to earn a directing career, and earned two
Academy Awards from his peers, Wise should have felt perfectly comfortable as
part of the filmmaking scene, accepted as a veteran team player and influential
insider. Yet it's hard to believe that he ever reached that level of comfort in
Hollywood, for no filmmaker has ever been so skillful in portraying uneasy,
alienated loners, strangers in strange lands, which explains why his science
fiction films can be so memorable.
He would be an important
figure in film history simply because he edited Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, but Wise soon moved on to
directing, first with the subdued and atmospheric The Curse of the Cat People and the oddly appealing The Body Snatcher, one of the few horror
films of the period that contrives to be genuinely unsettling. But these quiet
triumphs could not have prepared anyone for the masterful, mesmerizing The Day the Earth Stood Still. It is a
film that both reflects and comments on the so-called "paranoia" of the 1950s,
a film that is both courageous enough to side with its alien visitor Klaatu
against the trigger-happy militarists of the American government and honest
enough to acknowledge the sinister overtones in Klaatu's mandated alternative
to immature human decision-making. There
are within it interesting little films about Patricia Neal's travails as a single
parent and Sam JAFFE's sincere but futile efforts to rally Earth's scientists
as a challenge to their government. It is, overwhelmingly and overpoweringly, a
haunting film about lonely people in a new and alien environment, doing the
best they can to find companions and make the right choices, not always with
success. One could write a million words about this film and never exhaust its
mysteries.
As a reward for his
tremendous success with The Day the Earth
Stood Still, Wise was allowed to move away from genre films, unless
one counts Helen of Troy, which,
while not as bad as most reports indicates, visibly involves the sort of
aristocratic interactions that did not interest its director. After proving
better able to empathize with the mixed-up delinquents of the musical West Side Story (1961), Wise more
impressively examined the life of one mixed-up youth, magnificently portrayed
by Julie Harris, in The Haunting,
still one of the best ghost films ever made, and an enduring rebuke to anyone
who believe that scary films demand spectacular special effects. I have no idea
why anyone would regard the director of this stunning, disturbing film as the
ideal choice to direct the wholesome Julie Andrews musicals The Sound of Music (1965) and Star (1968), or why anyone would wish to
watch or talk about those films; it was surely because Wise found the
experience of directing these films so unfulfilling that he seized the chance
to return to science fiction with The
Andromeda Strain.
The politic subtexts of The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Andromeda Strain are similar—arguing
that governments are simply not able to deal with alien invasions—but The Andromeda Strain updates that message
for the computer age in devastating fashion. For, while The Day the Earth Stood Still worked
capably within the conventions of the Hollywood film, The Andromeda Strain achieves its power by
deliberately defying those conventions in any number of ways, including the
absence of background music, the casting of unfamiliar actors, and the refusal
to provide a romantic subplot. The film's rhythms are irregular and unsettling,
just like the eerie, futuristic underground laboratory that is its main
setting; its characters do not seem properly connected to the narrative, or to
each other. All of this serves to enhance the film's aura of oppressive menace:
although Ridley SCOTT's titular Alien
is frightening, it is also playing by all the rules that have governed horror
movies for decades; the unseen, unknowable alien presence in The Andromeda Strain is far more
frightening because it is not playing by any of the rules.
Given all his successes in
the genre (and one should also note his reasonably effective analysis of
reincarnation in Audrey Rose), it
is hard to argue that he was a poor choice to direct Star Trek: The Motion Picture. But that was a project doomed
from the start, since the story of how the film came to be made—the
improbable rebirth of a long-dead television series and the emotional reunion
of its original cast—was always going to be more important than any story
that unfolded on the screen. Inevitably, Star
Trek: The Motion Picture emerged as impossibly self-absorbed, with
everyone involved so stunned by the film's very existence as to have little
energy for anything but celebratory gestures. Yet Wise creates one memorable
sequence, a homage to David Bowman's journey through the Star Gate in 2001: A Space Odyssey, featuring Mr. Spock
in a spacesuit venturing alone into the bowels of the enigmatic V'Ger and observing
its bizarre phenomena. The scene briefly offers the disturbing message that Star Trek adventures otherwise labor to
suppress: namely, that humans venturing into outer space are going to be
lonely, vulnerable, and puzzled creatures. And these are all feelings that
Robert Wise knows, and projects, extremely well.
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