Robert Wise Articles

I mentioned dignified, gentlemanly, and usually a little dull Walter Pidgeon the other day, wishing he had been cast as Jane Powell’s grandfather in A Date with Judy (1948) so he could (more or less) have dated Carmen Miranda on-screen. Had that happened, you could forget Greer Garson — and Tracy-Hepburn, Ladd-Lake, Loy-Powell, Flynn-de Havilland, Garbo-Gilbert, and Abbott-Costello. Pidgeon-Miranda would have been the movie couple [...]

Patricia Neal in her two best-known movies: Robert Wise’s sci-fier The Day the Earth Stood Still, with Gort (Lock Martin) and Michael Rennie (top); Martin Ritt’s family drama/social commentary Hud, with Paul Newman (bottom) Patricia Neal, who died of lung cancer on Sunday, became one of my favorite movie performers when I was a little kid and saw her in — inevitably — The Day [...]

Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker Remember the backlash following former Academy president and two-time Best Director Oscar winner Robert Wise’s ad asking Academy members to vote for Martin Scorsese’s Miramax release Gangs of New York back in early 2003? You don’t? Well, apparently neither does Voltage Pictures producer Nicolas Chartier, whose The Hurt Locker is the favorite to win this year’s Best Picture Academy [...]

Julie Harris, Claire Bloom in The Haunting (top); The Village People in Can’t Stop the Music (bottom) "Out at the Pictures" at London’s bfi Southbank: Robert Wise’s horror-house classic The Haunting (1963), starring Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, and Russ Tamblyn Nancy Walker’s costly box-office disaster Can’t Stop the Music (1980), starring a rollerblading Steve Guttenberg (in some tight, tight shorts that would get [...]