Sturges, John

Sturges, John (1911-1992), American film director. Sturges came from the American Midwest. He moved to Hollywood, worked at RKO as a film editor, and went on to direct.

Sturges made his best films in the 1950s and early 1960s, including many outstanding Westerns. In Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Spencer Tracy played a one-armed, unwanted visitor to a small desert town which had something to hide. The film is generally recognized to be a masterpiece of relentless tension and expertly controlled violence, and was followed by another, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas.

Successes such as these gave Sturges more scope and brought him more back-up from the cinema industry, but some felt that the bigger films which followed lacked the economy and brilliance of his earlier works. The Magnificent Seven (1960) was a Western version of the Japanese classic Shichinin no Samurai (1954, The Seven Samurai), with Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen in its all-star cast. The Great Escape (1963) changed setting to a World War II prisoner-of-war camp; Ice Station Zebra (1968) took the Cold War to the North Pole; and The Eagle has Landed (1976) was a spy thriller, again with many stars. Sturges is perhaps best remembered for his spare and compelling early Westerns.