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Robert Wise: Rko Studios
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After a period of time, Wise was promoted to Assistant Film Editor and finally in 1938 became a Film Editor. Important editing assignments gradually came his way, including one with Orson Welles on the seminal "Citizen Kane." The skill and imagination Wise demonstrated led him to Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons" and to an unexpected opportunity. While Welles was doing a film in South America as part of the U.S. government's Good Neighbor Policy, it was discovered from previews that "Ambersons" needed some additional scenes to be filmed in order to make the picture play as it should for audiences. In Welles' absence, the studio assigned the young editor to direct the scenes.
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Wise grew up in Connersville, Indiana, and in 1931 enrolled at Franklin College to study journalism, but the Depression curtailed his education. In 1933 he went to Hollywood and began working at RKO…
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The film won raves from attendees at France's famed Cannes Film Festival, but RKO dropped Wise after being acquired by millionaire Howard Hughes in 1950. Undeterred, Wise moved to 20th Century Fox and made the melodrama Three Secrets. The following year he directed one of his most highly regarded films, the science-fiction thriller The Day the Earth Stood Still, in 1951. The film's story of an alien visitor who warns humans of the dangers of war has been taken as everything from a commentary on the Cold War to a religious allegory. Wise himself was ambiguous about the significance of the alien Klaatu (Michael Rennie). "Put a beard on him and you could have the Christ figure," he is said to have remarked, according to the Daily Telegraph, but the Independent quoted him as saying that he had missed the potential significance of the fact that Klaatu takes the name Carpenter after being brought back from the dead.
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Crisis meetings were called at RKO and Wise was ordered to recut the picture and add scenes to clarify it for restless audiences. Some 25 minutes of Welles's work were irrevocably junked, and Wise added sequences depicting the death of Major Amberson, the young lovers walking in the garden and the final scene in which, years later, they are reunited in a somewhat schmaltzy reconciliation. The additional material is of a lower order, though suggestions that it looks more prosaic than Welles's work are largely unfounded - the cameraman throughout the production was the gifted and distinctive Stanley Cortez.
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Characteristically modest, Wise always maintained that Welles chiefly took him on because they were about the same age and Welles preferred his attitude to that of the cynical old-timers in the studio's editing department. Wise received his first Academy Award nomination for editing the film.
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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... 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.
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