John Sturges

Biography

John Eliot Sturges (January 3, 1910 – August 18, 1992) was an American film director best known for westerns, war films and adventure stories. He began in Hollywood in 1932 as a film editor. During the Second World War he directed documentaries and training films for the United States Army Air Forces, including a well-known documentary on the conflict made with William Wyler. His first solo feature was The Man Who Dared (1946), a low-budget western.

He then turned to big-screen genre entertainment, and his films carry a recognisable personal style. He worked with major stars such as Spencer Tracy, William Holden, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster and Steve McQueen, and he was known for finding character depth inside the conventions of his genres. He made imaginative use of CinemaScope, most notably in Bad Day at Black Rock, which places Tracy alone against a vast desert landscape and earned Sturges a Best Director Oscar nomination. Other key titles include Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, a much admired version of the famous shootout, The Old Man and the Sea, based on Hemingway, and Last Train from Gun Hill.

His most commercially successful film was The Magnificent Seven (1960), a western reworking of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, which was later selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. He then directed and produced The Great Escape (1963), which made Steve McQueen a star. He followed it with The Hallelujah Trail, Ice Station Zebra, Joe Kidd and The Eagle Has Landed (1976), his last feature, based on a novel by Jack Higgins.

Sturges received a Golden Boot Award in 1992, the year he died, for his contribution to the western. Today he is regarded as a skilled craftsman whose genre films still carry a distinct personality.

Key films

• Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), with Spencer Tracy as a stranger arriving in a desert town with a secret.
• Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), a version of the famous shootout starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas.
• The Old Man and the Sea (1958), an adaptation of Hemingway's novel with Spencer Tracy.
• The Magnificent Seven (1960), an ensemble western that became one of his biggest hits.
• The Great Escape (1963), a prisoner-of-war escape story that gave Steve McQueen his star role.
• The Eagle Has Landed (1976), his final film, based on the novel by Jack Higgins.