The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (451 page)

This same vulnerability characterized
Phone Call From a Stranger
(52, Jean Negulesco),
The Big Knife
(55, Robert Aldrich),
The Night of the Hunter
(55, Charles Laughton), in which she is discovered on the bottom of the lake, still sitting up in a car, hair flowing like weed, and
The Chapman Report
(62, Cukor). But she is equally adept, if hard to restrain, in more domineering parts:
Mambo
(54, Robert Rossen);
Executive Suite
(54, Robert Wise);
I Am a Camera
(55, Henry Cornelius); Stevens’s
The Diary of Anne Frank
(59), for which she won the supporting Oscar; as Charlotte Haze in
Lolita
(62, Stanley Kubrick);
The Balcony
(63, Joseph Strick);
A Patch of Blue
(65, Guy Green) and another supporting Oscar;
The Scalphunters
(68, Sydney Pollack); the delirious
Bloody Mama
(70, Roger Corman). Add to this Wellman’s
My Man and I
(52); Fregonese’s
Untamed Frontier
(52); Fred M. Wilcox’s
Tennessee Champ
(54); Walsh’s
Saskatchewan
(54); Heisler’s
I Died a Thousand Times
(55); Wise’s
Odds Against Tomorrow
(59); Frankenheimer’s
The Young Savages
(61); Lewis Gilbert’s
Alfie
(66); Barry Shear’s
Wild in the Streets
(68); Curtis Harrington’s
Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?
(71) and
What’s the Matter with Helen?
(71); and Paul Mazursky’s
Blume in Love
(73); and it looks a very versatile career that never lost its sense of loudmouth fun. Not least in
The Poseidon Adventure
(72, Ronald Neame) in which she asks us to believe that, as New York underwater swimming champion, she once held her breath for two minutes forty-seven seconds.

She was garrulous still in
That Lucky Touch
(75, Christopher Miles);
Diamonds
(75, Menahem Golan); a casebook Jewish mother in
Next Stop, Greenwich Village
(75, Mazursky); the sleazy concierge in
The Tenant
(76, Roman Polanski);
Tentacles
(76, Oliver Hellman);
Pete’s Dragon
(77, Don Chaffey);
The Magician of Lublin
(79, Golan); and
City on Fire
(79, Alvin Rakoff).

After that she published two lively volumes of autobiography and appeared in:
Elvis, the Movie
(79, John Carpenter);
S.O.B
. (81, Blake Edwards);
Fanny Hill
(83, Gerry O’Hara);
Over the Brooklyn Bridge
(83, Golan);
Ellie
(84, Peter Wittman);
Deja Vu
(85, Anthony Richmond);
The Delta Force
(86, Golan);
Very Close Quarters
(86, Vladimir Rif);
Purple People Eater
(88, Linda Shayne);
An Unremarkable Life
(89, Amin Q. Chaudhri);
Touch of a Stranger
(90, Brad Gilbert); and
Stepping Out
(91, Lewis Gilbert). And on TV, as the grandmother in
Roseanne
.

At eighty, she plugged on:
Weep No More, My Lady
(92, Michel Andrieu);
The Pickle
(93, Mazursky);
Il Silenzio del Prosciutti
(94, Ezio Greggio);
Backfire!
(95, A. Dean Bell);
Jury Duty
(95, John Fortenberry);
Mrs. Munck
(95, Diane Ladd);
Heavy
(95, James Mangold);
Raging Angels
(95, Alan Smithee);
The Portrait of a Lady
(96, Jane Campion), in which, on screen, she was married to John Gielgud—you see, the movies are better than life;
Gideon
(99, Claudia Hoover);
La Bomba
(99, Giulio Base).

Robert Wise
(1914–2005), b. Winchester, Indiana
1944:
The Curse of the Cat People
(codirected with Gunther von Fritsch);
Mademoiselle Fifi
. 1945:
The Body Snatcher; A Game of Death
. 1946:
Criminal Court
. 1947:
Born to Kill
. 1948:
Mystery in Mexico; Blood on the Moon
. 1949:
The Set-Up
. 1950:
Two Flags West; Three Secrets
. 1951:
The House on Telegraph Hill; The Day the Earth Stood Still
. 1952:
The Captive City; Something for the Birds
. 1953:
Destination Gobi; The Desert Rats; So Big
. 1954:
Executive Suite
. 1955:
Helen of Troy
. 1956:
Tribute to a Bad Man; Somebody Up There Likes Me
. 1957:
This Could Be the Night; Until They Sail
. 1958:
Run Silent, Run Deep; I Want to Live
. 1959:
Odds Against Tomorrow
. 1961:
West Side Story
(codirected with Jerome Robbins). 1962:
Two for the Seesaw
. 1963:
The Haunting
. 1965:
The Sound of Music
. 1966:
The Sand Pebbles
. 1968:
Star!
. 1971:
The Andromeda Strain
. 1975:
The Hindenburg
. 1977:
Audrey Rose
. 1979:
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
. 1989:
Rooftops
. 2000:
A Storm in Summer
.

There was a time when Wise was thought promising. But it is now clear that his better credits are only the haphazard products of artistic aimlessness given rare guidance. He wandered as easily into mediocrity or worse, and it is a proof of the Hollywood bizarre that he should have edited and completed that masterpiece deserted by its maker,
The Magnificent Ambersons
, and also brought to the screen the appalling but grotesquely successful
The Sound of Music
.

Wise began as a journalist and then joined the sound department at RKO. From there, he rose to become an editor, working on
Fifth Avenue Girl
(39, Gregory La Cava);
The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle
(39, H. C. Potter);
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
, (39, William Dieterle);
Bachelor Mother
(39, Garson Kanin);
My Favorite Wife
(40, Kanin);
All That Money Can Buy
(41, Dieterle);
Seven Days’ Leave
(42, Tim Whelan)—as well as
Citizen Kane
and
Ambersons
. Wise deserves no blame for the hurried change of tone that ends
Ambersons;
indeed, it is likely that his tact saved it from worse fates. But neither does he qualify for much credit. One has only to recall Welles’s complaint about the hours spent with
Kane
on the moviola to identify the editing style of that film.

In 1944, Wise was promoted to take over direction of Val Lewton’s
The Curse of the Cat People
—and thus he began auspiciously. Two more Lewton pictures,
Mademoiselle Fifi
and
The Body Snatcher
, are confirmation of the producer’s overall conception. Thus Wise began with his most interesting pictures. Years later, he went back to the supernatural with
The Haunting
, and made an opulent-looking but muddled, tentative movie. The schematic, contrived, and overrated
The Set-Up
still hangs on Robert Ryan. A better boxing movie,
Somebody Up There Likes Me
, comes alive with Paul Newman’s appetite for the big break. The prominent melodrama of
I Want to Live
is due to Susan Hayward. Against that, the failures can be attributed to Wise:
So Big
, a restrained women’s picture;
Run Silent, Run Deep
—but not quite unobtrusive enough; the chocolate box travesty of
West Side Story;
the sorry waste of Mitchum and MacLaine in
Two for the Seesaw
.

There is nothing to be said about
The Sound of Music
except that three years later Wise managed to make as big a flop with the same Julie Andrews in
Star!
He tried for realism and romance with equal vagueness, and there was a restless, dispiriting search among subject areas—war, epic, musical, science fiction, horror, crime, Western—that never caught up with interest.

Wise won best picture twice (with
West Side Story
and
The Sound of Music
). He won best director for the same movies, and he was nominated again for
I Want to Live
. Less known, but so much better, is 1947’s
Born to Kill
at RKO, a harsh, unsettling thriller in which Claire Trevor and Lawrence Tierney display grownup attitudes and ugly instincts enough to still the sound of music. Yet it was easier to do good work in 1947 than in the early sixties.
Born to Kill
could easily have been written by Jim Thompson.

Frederick Wiseman
, b. Boston, Massachusetts, 1930
1967:
Titicut Follies
(d). 1968:
High School
(d). 1969:
Law and Order
(d). 1970:
Hospital
(d). 1971:
Basic Training
(d). 1972:
Essene
(d). 1973:
Juvenile Court
(d). 1974:
Primate
(d). 1975:
Welfare
(d). 1976:
Meat
(d). 1977:
Canal Zone
(d). 1978:
Sinai Field Mission
(d). 1979:
Manoeuvre
(d). 1980:
Model
(d). 1982:
Seraphita’s Diary
. 1983:
The Store
(d). 1985:
Racetrack
(d). 1987:
Blind
(d);
Deaf
(d);
Missile
(d). 1989:
Near Death
(d). 1990:
Central Park
(d). 1991:
Aspen
(d). 1993:
Zoo
(d). 1994:
High School II
(d). 1995:
Ballet
(d). 1996:
La Comédie-Française, ou L’Amour Joué
(d). 1997:
Public Housing
(d). 1999:
Belfast, Maine
(d);
Domestic Violence
(d). 2002:
La Dernière Lettre
(d);
Domestic Violence 2
(d). 2005:
The Garden
(d). 2006:
State Legislature
(d). 2009:
La Danse
(d).

Fred Wiseman pledges himself to being straightforward, but his work has taught us how ambivalent an attitude that is. There are touchstones of conscientious austerity and simplicity throughout his films: hand-held eavesdropping records of actuality, black-and-white photography, the absence of any narrative or music. They add up to the sincere hope that “If the films do anything, they provide people with information which they may be in a position to use at some point along the line along with other kinds of information to influence the way they make a decision about something that’s going on in society.”

That sounds constructive and rational, very much what you would expect from a moderately radical and creative lawyer who became interested in films as “a form of natural history. I try to look at what is going on to discover what kind of power relationships exist and differences between ideology and the practice in terms of the way people are treated. The theme that unites the films is the relationship of people to authority.”

That promises general understanding and a kind of sociological survey that sorts evidence on the way to principles. But Wiseman’s films, like anyone else’s, are helplessly particular: he can only select unique institutions, film certain moments, and compose them in one way. We are not seeing the generality, much less an objective view. But the patina of fairness excuses Wiseman from that most dangerous and necessary thing: the transition from data to opinion. We are seeing through Wiseman’s eyes, so that it is perplexing and perverse of him to try to disown his own power of sight and the consequent effects on conscience. After all, it is ridiculous for Wiseman to have so obsessive a subject while denying frame of mind. Whoever said that movies offer “information”? They are about atmosphere—yet Wiseman proposes clean air.

His minimalism is decent, but puritanical and repressed. It does nothing to prohibit the power of atmosphere and experience in his films. His loyalty to bureaucracy is as great as Kafka’s, but Wiseman has so purged himself of his own reactions that he sometimes makes what seem like unattended films, sustained by the listless momentum of the system and the demoralized complicity of all of us who are involved in it. Shy of ideological commitment and formal construct, and alarmed at the prospect of his own anger or dismay, Wiseman often seems as meek as the animals who engage his sensibility most strongly—in
Primate
and
Meat
.

His films are remarkable records of institutions, seemingly untroubled by the dilemma of how far ordinary people act when their monotony is filmed (and instantly glamorized). But why do so many institutions admit Wiseman’s camera? Is it out of the vanity that likes to keep records of itself, or is it because bureaucrats feel kinship with the director’s dispassionate method? Despite the obvious conclusion that Wiseman is accumulating an epic documentary panorama of American systems, it is oddly short of Americans and averse to the thought that policy is within Americans’ control. The persistent implication is of a condition that is self-sufficient, unquestionable, and forlorn. One has to compare Wiseman’s work with any of the great nineteenth-century social surveys to feel the lack of humor, cantankerousness, and energy. The camera’s placid obedience to its own pressed button is the energy center in most Wiseman films. And that pardons the mind from protesting. It is instructive that his films have generally grown longer and more remote, as pungency and morals slipped out of reach. One longs for a shot of journalistic bias.