Nina Foch and William Holden

Houseman handpicked Wise for the project, confident that the director's sense of pacing and structure would elicit the maximum amount of tension and action from the dialogue-heavy script. Wise came through with flying colors, making some radical choices along the way. There was no music in the film, only the sounds found in the business world (such as the Wall Street clock chimes that solemnly announce each actor's name in the credits). Having been trained as a sound editor, Wise was particularly astute when it came to music and sound in his films. "A good score, when used in the right way, can add qualities and dimensions that enrich and strengthen your film. A very important aspect of choosing where to have music in a film is where you don't use it, for as valuable as where the music should go is where there shouldn't be any."*

Wise didn't want to use any fades or dissolves in the movie, preferring to strengthen its rhythm with straight cuts. "Because of the way the story built from the beginning and how it went along—all the people involved, all the different scenes—I thought I could keep the momentum without having to do time lapses. It seemed to me that we were so locked into dissolves and fade-outs that it became almost a cliché."*