Carol Reed, huh? I don't think Wise ever made anything quite on the level of The Third Man , as I'm sure you'll agree. But much of the success of that film owes to Graham Greene, Joseph Cotton, and Orson Welles, and that zither music. So your point is well taken insofar as Wise's best flicks were those with the best collaborators. So The Set Up, say, owes as much to Robert Ryan's embodiment of the noble palooka and the cinematography as to the direction. And Odds Against Tomorrow benefits from the same actor's strikingly different performance and John Lewis's score. And it mustn't be forgotten that The Day the Earth Stood Still was scored by the superlative Bernard Herrmann, who contributed immeasurably to every film he put his hand to.
Still, I'd compare him more to a professional like Sidney Lumet, who made some very good films as well as some stinkers like The Wiz.
It's nice that Wise was a nice guy in the land of supreme assholery, though.