http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/15/arts/15wise.html Robert Wise, a conscientious craftsman in many movie genres who twice received Academy Awards as best director, died yesterday at the U.C.L.A. Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 91.
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Other films by Mr. Wise that continue to enjoy enthusiastic support include "The Body Snatcher," a 1945 horror film with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi; "The Set-Up," a gritty 1949 study of second- rate boxers; and the 1951 science-fiction cult favorite "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Mr. Wise counted among his own favorites "The Haunting," a cult favorite from 1963 with Julie Harris and Claire Bloom, and the 1958 drama about capital punishment, "I Want to Live!" Mr. Wise considered himself a director of content, not messages, and he was not afraid to experiment. In 1959 he filmed "Odds Against Tomorrow," an antiracist drama with Harry Belafonte and Robert Ryan about a brutal bank robbery that he made without the customary fades (going to black) or dissolves (overlapping scenes) to denote the passage of time. Fades and dissolves, he remarked, tend to slow the tempo and break the mood.
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When Mr. Wise was 83 he told The New York Times that "Citizen Kane" was not particularly difficult to edit, partly because of the masterly cinematography by Gregg Toland. From the outset, Mr. Wise said that he knew the film was singular. "You would see those extraordinary dailies every day, the marvelous photography and angles and great scenes with actors that were new to the screen, you'd see this and know it was quite special," Mr. Wise said. "And to think that Welles was 25, and it was his first film. Remarkable really." (The self-effacing Mr. Wise neglected to mention that he was less than a year older than Welles.)
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