'Sound of Music,' 'West Side Story' Director Robert Wise Dies

Robert Wise, 91, an eclectic and acclaimed film director often identified with the two grand-scale musicals that won him Academy Awards, "West Side Story" (1961) and "The Sound of Music" (1965), died Sept. 14 at a hospital in Los Angeles. He had a heart ailment.

Mr. Wise won early applause as a film editor on Orson Welles's masterpiece "Citizen Kane" (1941) and, during the next several decades, distinguished himself directing films that skipped across genres with consistent credibility. He dismissed as "esoteric" those critics who found him lacking a single style and wanted to tag him like Alfred Hitchcock as the king of suspense or John Ford as the master of westerns.

Mr. Wise's movies included science-fiction tinglers ("The Day the Earth Stood Still," 1951); a boardroom intrigue ("Executive Suite," 1954); war stories ("Run Silent, Run Deep," 1958); fight dramas ("Somebody Up There Likes Me," 1956); an indictment of capital punishment ("I Want to Live!," 1958); a crime story with a racial tinge ("Odds Against Tomorrow," 1959); and a ghost tale ("The Haunting," 1963).

Among his finest features was the boxing story "The Set-Up" (1949) with Robert Ryan as a fought-out pugilist who refuses to take a dive. To prepare for "The Set-Up," Mr. Wise visited a boxing arena in Long Beach, Calif., wanting to observe how boxers acted in the dressing room after they lost.

The picture was astonishing -- shot in 72 minutes of real time and showcasing brutal fight sequences that later influenced Martin Scorsese's "Raging Bull." Mr. Wise won the international critics' award for best director at the Cannes Film Festival.

By the early 1960s, he was at the peak of his profession. "West Side Story," which he produced, won the Oscar for best picture, and he shared the award for best director with Jerome Robbins.

In the opening scene, he flew in a helicopter and showed a bird's-eye view of New York City, cutting from neighborhood to neighborhood. That was markedly different from previous openings with the static skyline scene and, to Mr. Wise, solved the problem of making the musical of singing gang members believable.

He told an interviewer in 1998 that "because it was kind of an abstract, I think it put the audience in the frame of mind to accept the kids dancing in the street just a few minutes later, a few beats later after we get out of the playground."

Directing "The Sound of Music," one of the highest-grossing films in history, was not a sure bet. The Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein II musical about a family of plucky Austrian singers amid the Nazis' rise had a long Broadway run but received scathing reviews. New York theater critic Walter Kerr wrote that the show was "not only too sweet for words, but almost too sweet for music."

Mr. Wise reshaped some of the play with screenwriter Ernest Lehman and liberated the staginess with the soaring opening shot of the Austrian Alps. He also directed such songs as "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" mostly in shadow, trying "in every way I could not to make it too onerous."

He won the Oscar for directing "The Sound of Music," which also won for best picture, and insisted on a share of the profits.

Robert Earl Wise, a grocer's son, was born Sept. 10, 1914, in Winchester, Ind. He spent most of his spare time in bijous -- he recalled "The Three Musketeers" (1921) with Douglas Fairbanks as great fun -- and writing sports articles for his high school newspaper.