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THERE goes another Hollywood legend. So Robert Wise has taken to his heavenly abode as did Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick and William Wyler—all of who took Hollywood cinema (known mainly for its escapist fare) to Olympian heights. The 1960s were his salad days when he came out with two great musicals, West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965). That subway dancing sequence in West Side Story with Natalie Wood, Russ Tamblyn, George Chakiris and co doing the honours is watchable even today. As for The Sound of Music, nothing need be said about this classic. Wise who edited the immortal classic Citizen Kane (1941) came up the hard way. Working with that genius Orson Welles must have been a learning experience. About the life of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst (his grand-daughter Patty made news for the wrong reasons), it was shot by another Hollywood legend Greg Toland. And though Wise may be remembered for his musicals, his versatility was amazing. One has only to see The Andromeda Strain (1970) to notice this. Based on a Michael Crichton novel (before he went into writing scripts like Jurassic Park and others) to appreciate this. It is a thinking man’s sci-fi about scientists working frantically to neutralise an infected village and also brings out man’s inhumanity to his fellow man. This writer had the good fortune to run into Wise twice. The first time when he was in India for the International Film Festival in New Delhi in the early 1980s, when his film print did not arrive in time. Those probably were the teething times of IFFI but he seemed to take it fairly well. The next time was in Hollywood, when in 1984 when he took me for lunch to "The Brown Derby," one of the last surviving old Hollywood restaurants. Also lunching there were Clint Eastwood and Teri Garr. By then he was already riding into the sunset but was still actively associated with the American Film Institute. One can remember him talking about the trouble he had with his producers while shooting Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). Times were a changing and the director did not get the independence he got in the 1960s. Movies were also beginning to be made on an assembly line. Wise was also critical of the quality of films being produced in the 1980s and mentioned Rhinestone for one and he went on imitating Sly Stallone shooting from the hip. Stallone and Dolly Parton had also received their stars on the Hollywood boulevard to which he had no objections. "But why make mindless films like this," he lamented. But otherwise he was a fund of knowledge and recalled his career in bits and parts. What about the Hearst Mansion on the route from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Did he revisit it after the shooting of Citizen Kane? No, he said, he’d wanting to do that for some years but like so many of us his life was divided into the compulsory and the optional. He’d rather do the optional but often ended doing the compulsory. |
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