A name associated almost exclusively with large-scale action-adventure films, director and producer John Sturges was one of Hollywood's top filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, known for creating elevated, large-scale, character-driven dramas within the confines of genre filmmaking.
A name associated almost exclusively with large-scale action-adventure films, director and producer John Sturges was one of Hollywood's top filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, known for creating elevated, large-scale, character-driven dramas within the confines of genre filmmaking.
Sturges started his career in Hollywood at RKO (one of the Big Five studios during Hollywood’s Golden Age) in 1932, spending most of his early career in the studio's art department and editing room, until leaving during World War II to work on behalf of the U.S. Army Signal Corps and then the Air Force. He served in Africa, Italy, Corsica and Britain, eventually directing 37 training films and five documentaries.
He returned to Hollywood as a director in 1946 with The Man Who Dared, the first of many fairly undistinguished B movies. That would all change in 1954 with Bad Day at Black Rock, for which Sturges coaxed a great performance out of the legendary star Spencer Tracy, and made imaginative use of the widescreen CinemaScope format, resulting in stark scenes of Tracy against a vast desert panorama. His decisions transformed the film from a routine suspense vehicle into a powerful thriller dealing with the subjects of racism and violence.
Sturges received a Best Director Oscar nomination for Bad Day At Black Rock, his only Academy Award nomination. Afterwards, he became sought out by Hollywood's top producers and created a string of hits: Gunfight At the O.K. Corral (1957), The Old Man and the Sea (1958), and The Last Train From Gun Hill (1959).
His success continued with The Magnificent Seven (1960), which Sturges both directed and produced. A large-scale Western action vehicle adapted from Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai, the film turned most of its featured players—including Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn—into stars. It was the second time Sturges had worked with McQueen (the actor had a supporting role in Sturges’s Never So Few), and their third time would be even more of a charm.
Enter The Great Escape (1963): a fact-based war drama in which McQueen plays Virgil Hilts, a World War II prisoner of war who along with fellow POWs makes an escape from a high-security detention camp. The film became an enormous theatrical hit and home video favorite; the iconic scene of Hilts riding a motorcycle and jumping a barbed-wire fence to escape from German soldiers is considered one of the best stunts ever made and solidified McQueen as a bona fide action star. The Great Escape was one of the highest-grossing films of the year, and it would become the high water mark of Sturges' career.
Subsequent movies by Sturges were popular but never on the scale of his early 1960s work (like Ice Station Zebra (1968) and Joe Kidd (1972)), and some were even box office failures (like The Hallelujah Trail (1965) and Hour of the Gun (1967)).
Regardless, whether a Western or War drama, Sturges approached his films with the eye of a technician and the instinct of an artist. His movies were often mean and muscular and celebrated situations involving tough men in desperate situations. His protagonists were rugged, handsome, and daring. Framed in Sturges’s lens, they became icons for an enduring brand of midcentury masculinity.
In 2013, The Magnificent Seven was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." The selection would have certainly pleased Sturges, who had passed nearly two decades earlier in 1992. The director once met Akira Kurosawa, who reportedly told him that he loved The Magnificent Seven (which was a remake of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai). Sturges considered this the proudest moment of his professional career.