Robert Wise, dead at 91

[RayKelly]

From the Hollywood Reporter:

Robert Wise, a four-time Academy Award winner whose epic 65-year career ranged from editing Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" to directing the quintessential 1960s musical "The Sound of Music" to launching the first "Star Trek" film, died Wednesday of heart failure. He was 91.

Wise, who was honored with the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award in 1998, enjoyed a longevity that few filmmakers achieve: His resume ranged from his early work as a sound editor on Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals like "The Gay Divorcee" to his collaboration as a film editor with Welles on "Citizen Kane" and "The Magnificent Ambersons" to his emergence as a director, and later producer, of films as varied as "The Day the Earth Stood Still," "I Want to Live!" and "West Side Story," which he co-directed with Jerome Robbins. His filmography covers almost every genre except animation.

[Roger Ryan]

Here's what Time Magazine had to say about Wise's passing (notice Schickel's reference to Welles "abandoning" the Wise-edited "Magnificent Ambersons"!):

Posted Sunday, Sep. 18, 2005
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