Robert Wise

He learned movies at a bench rather than on a set. Robert Wise came up as an editor, and his cutting on Citizen Kane brought him an Academy Award nomination for Best Film Editing. Directors who start in the cutting room tend to know precisely how little an audience needs, and Wise built a whole career on that arithmetic.

His run as a director is among the strangest of the studio era because it refuses to specialise. The Set-Up in 1949 is a boxing film told almost in real time. The Day the Earth Stood Still in 1951 is science fiction with the manners of a diplomatic thriller. The Haunting in 1963 frightens an audience while showing essentially nothing, which is the editor's trick performed at feature length. Then came two musicals, West Side Story and The Sound of Music, and Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture on both.

Nothing in that pair predicted what came next. He produced and directed The Sand Pebbles, a long sour picture about an American gunboat in China that took a Best Picture nomination; he made the expensive musical Star!, which failed; he turned The Andromeda Strain into a procedural about scientists doing paperwork under pressure; and he closed the directing run in 1979 with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, cold and slow and considerably more interesting than its reputation.

If there is a signature, it is temperature. A Wise film stays cool to the touch even when the material is hot, and the same discipline that makes The Sound of Music work as engineering is what makes The Haunting unbearable.