How I Wised Up

Twenty years ago this month, I interviewed the director of The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, The Sand Pebbles, and the original Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

When I called the filmmaker Robert Wise in December 2004, he was 90 and I was 21. The interview was one of my first brushes with Hollywood, and it remains one of my most memorable. It has also proven to be instructive in ways I did not foresee at the time.

To invoke a line from a certain famous song from The Sound of Music, the beloved screen adaptation of which was produced and directed by Wise: Let me start at the very beginning.

At the time of the interview, I was placing numerous calls around the country and the world in furtherance of my quixotic first book project, an oral history with colleagues and collaborators of Orson Welles. Before he took a seat in the director’s chair, Wise put in time as the editor of Welles’s masterpieces Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. The agreed-upon subject of my interview with Wise was his tenure with Welles—which, unhappily, included Wise overseeing the significant editorial revisions made to Ambersons, which was released in a form much deviated from Welles’s intentions.  

I was, at that time, very much a Wellesian and assuredly not a Wisean—the latter an adjective that does not even exist since the state of fandom it would describe is nonexistent. Put more plainly, I assented to the widely held view among serious film fans that Welles was a nonpareil genius and Wise was, at best, an adequate technician and, at worst, a traitorous figure for participating in the modifications to Ambersons. In his classic book The American Cinema, the great film critic Andrew Sarris could muster no more than this about Wise: “His temperament is vaguely liberal, his style vaguely realistic.” Of course, the public, which generally turned Wise productions into big hits, embraced his work, but more on that in a moment.

My firm opinions about Wise vs. Welles withered once I got on the phone with the man. Wise remains the most courteous, mild-mannered, and accommodating multiple Oscar-winner I have ever interviewed. This is surely a low bar, but it does not change the plain reality: Wise was so gracious in answering my questions—so willing to play along with the fiction that he had not given hundreds of other interviews about Welles—that common decency precluded me from interrogating him about what had happened on Ambersons. I certainly asked about the debacle—and he answered readily and candidly—but I was not in a mood to challenge him. He was too nice.

I realized that the virtue of gentlemanliness was perhaps greater than that of genius. I also began to wonder: If this was true in human terms—that Wise was a more civilized man than the self-described maverick Welles—could not the same be true in cinematic terms? What if Wise’s popular entertainments—sturdy, dependable, efficient—were not, ipso facto, inferior to Welles’s art-house bonbons?

To put it bluntly, what if The Sound of Music had more to offer, in the long run, than Citizen Kane?

Hear me out.

Based on the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The Sound of Music was not a subject of widespread detestation when it was released in 1965. My soon-to-be-married parents saw it on one of their first dates, and Oscar voters agreed with their good taste: It won five statuettes, including Best Picture. Sure, the film critic Pauline Kael denigrated it as “The Sound of Mucus,” but since when did she speak for the common moviegoer? (Kael once admitted that only one person in her social circle had voted for Nixon in 1972.) 

When I look at The Sound of Music today, I can readily discern its many qualities: the importation of stage-bound musical numbers to breathtaking real locations; the gradual maturation of Maria (Julie Andrews) from novitiate to prospective stepmother of the Von Trapp brood; the incremental moderation of Captain Von Trapp (Christopher Plummer) from steely widower to prospective husband of Maria; the way the camera ascends past the altar and, in a striking cut, beyond the top of the exterior of the basilica at the wedding of Maria and the captain. Wise helmed the ideal cinematic vessel to communicate the wisdom of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s tunes: “Do-Re-Mi” stands as a metaphor for mastering any subject, not just singing, and “My Favorite Things” offers its litany as a kind of bulwark against adversity of any kind. Could Welles have captured Plummer singing “Edelweiss” with as much expressive simplicity as Wise? I think not.

Wise made many other movies worth seeing and re-seeing: the film noir The Set-Up, the submarine movie Run Silent, Run Deep, the horror story The Haunting, the early Michael Crichton adaptation The Andromeda Strain. You have nothing to apologize for, Mr. Wise.

As for myself, I am not inclined to apologize for defending The Sound of Music. I am secure in the knowledge that H.L. Mencken—the Sage of Baltimore himself—had unaccountably loved the Leslie Caron musical Lili (a fact reported by Sarris, who also claimed it was the only movie Mencken ever saw). I am bolstered, too, by our president-elect’s unrepentant fondness for schmaltz, including the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Maybe I have entered the phase of life when the wholesome sentiment of The Sound of Music strikes me as more valuable—a better teacher, a richer experience—than the ostentatious cynicism of Citizen Kane. If so, my course was charted 20 years ago—when Robert Wise was so nice to me over the phone.

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