Escape Artist: The Life and Films of John Sturges (Wisconsin Studies in Film)

330 Pages·2008·3.42 MB·English

by  Glenn Lovell

Escape Artist
The Life and Films of John Sturges
Glenn Lovell
T U W P
HE NIVERSITY OF ISCONSIN RESS
This book was published with the support of the Anonymous Fund of the College of Letters and Science at the University of
Wisconsin–Madison.
The University of Wisconsin Press
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Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lovell, Glenn.
Escape artist: the life and films of John Sturges / Glenn Lovell.
p. cm.—(Wisconsin film studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-299-22830-9 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-299-22834-7 (pbk: alk. paper)
1. Sturges, John, 1910–1992.
2. Motion picture producers and directors—United States—Biography.
I. Title. II. Series.
PN1998.3.S779L68 2008
791.4302 ́33092—dc22 2008011967
[B]
For
DONNA,
Magnificent, too
Contents
Cover
Illustrations Set 1
Illustrations Set 2
Prologue: The Case for “The Other Sturges”
1. Sturges with a Blast of Rum
2. Youth
3. RKO
4. War & Wyler
5. Columbia Years
6. MGM
7. A Walk in the Sun
8. At Sea
9. Gun for Hire
10. The Rat Trap
11. Seven the Hard Way
12. Grand Illusion
13. Roadshows
Epilogue: The Best Escape

Acknowledgments
Filmography
Notes
Bibliography
Back Cover
Prologue
The Case for “The Other Sturges”
J
ohn Sturges may be the most popular but least discussed director of the
postwar era. The man behind such seminal action films as Bad Day at Black
Rock, The Magnificent Seven, and The Great Escape has all but passed beneath
the radar of critics and academicians
who laud his more morally ambiguous contemporaries, such as Robert Aldrich
and Anthony Mann. The stock argument against Sturges, who toiled on the
studio assembly line before proclaiming his independence as producer-director,
is that he was a technically proficient popcorn merchant, a plier of escapist
entertainment who seldom tackled social issues or peered deeply into the
conflicted soul. Further, the argument goes, Sturges, like Robert Wise and Mark
Robson, his editing buddies at RKO Pictures, eventually let ego get the better of
him, and allowed his later films—most notably Ice Station Zebra and Marooned
—to balloon into flashy and impersonal roadshow attractions. In The American
Cinema: Directors and Directions, under the heading “Strained Seriousness,”
Andrew Sarris lumped Sturges with Wise, John Frankenheimer, and Stanley
Kubrick as a solemn and self-conscious practitioner of the big action movie.
Those who have taken the time to review Sturges’s full career—from the
tautly drawn Mystery Street and Jeopardy to the melancholic Wyatt Earp–Doc
Holliday reunion Hour of the Gun—may want a second opinion. To turn another
Sarris section heading, “Less Than Meets the Eye,” back on itself, there is more
than meets the eye, quite a bit more, to the Sturges oeuvre. A protégé of William
Wyler and George Stevens, he was a gifted storyteller and keen judge of
emerging talent who worked in just about every genre: besides the signature
buddy Westerns, he turned out Gothic romances, period biopics, science-
speculation thrillers, and at least one quasi-musical (The Hallelujah Trail). And
when CinemaScope arrived, Sturges, whose eyes were never very good, saw its
potential for power proxemics. To this day, his minimalist Bad Day at Black
Rock stands with Elia Kazan’s East of Eden as the finest early example of the
widescreen process. Its dynamic groupings have been quoted by half the action
directors in Hollywood, including, most notably, Steven Spielberg, John
Carpenter, Walter Hill, Lawrence Kasdan, and Michael Bay.
To appreciate Sturges’s influence on the revisionist Western, one need but
draw a line from the Wyatt and Doc of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral to the
mercenaries of The Magnificent Seven to the mismatched paladins of Kasdan’s
Silverado and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. And where would Sergio Leone and
the spaghetti Western be without
Sturges? For good or ill, their hyperbolic theatricality and mordant sight gags
owe as much to the acrobatic gunplay at the O.K. Corral as they do to the
anarchic spirit of Sam Peckinpah, who in the 1960s almost teamed with Sturges
for a Magnificent Seven TV series.
Politically, Sturges was a fascinating whirl of contradictions—“a funny kind
of liberal conservative,” in son Michael’s words. He called himself “a
professional Democrat—very much on the liberal side.” In Hour of the Gun, he
commented on the dehumanizing effects of extra-legal law enforcement. In
McQ, starring John Wayne, he appeared to applaud police brutality as dispensed
to long-haired “hippie types.” He prided himself on being fair and open-minded,
almost courtly in demeanor, but he also could be as cold and intractable as
General Patton.
He took a stand against Cecil B. DeMille’s communist-smear tactics, was active
in both the directors and writers guilds, and contributed generously to the ACLU
—until it veered from his pro–death penalty stance. In the early 1970s, he, along
with John Lennon, was named to Nixon’s enemies list, and when a reporter
called to ask how he felt about it, he replied, “Honored.”
Though he for the most part avoided soapboxes, Sturges did not shy away
from thorny issues. In the guise of Saturday-night diversion, he tackled racism
(Black Rock, Last Train from Gun Hill, A Girl Named Tamiko), alcoholism (The
People against O’Hara), biological warfare (The Satan Bug), the abuse of power
(Hour of the Gun), and Cold War détente (Ice Station Zebra). Like Budd
Boetticher and Peckinpah, he spent considerable time south of the border and
worked diligently to cast Latinos in strong, non-race-specific roles. Ricardo
Montalban, a Massachusetts detective in Mystery Street and a New York
prizefighter in the casually interracial Right Cross, applauded Sturges’s
“courageous” refusal to buy into studio stereotyping.
The portrayal of Sturges as a “man’s man” comfortable only in the presence of
macho types always has smacked of pat generalization. On closer inspection we
find the prototypical child of divorce who for the first half of his life seeks the
approval and counsel of his mother and then, following her death, indulges an, if
not stifled, at least suppressed, masculinity.
On the set, more than one actress observed he could be stony,
distant. By Love Possessed and A Girl Named Tamiko, his 1960s women’s
pictures, were, in his own words, “definite miscues.” They also can be seen as
unintentional parodies of the form, attributable as much to a desperate-to-
appease Hollywood as any lack of directorial finesse with the opposite sex.
Sturges at this point had already directed Ethel Barrymore, Donna Reed, and
Barbara Stanwyck in some of their liveliest performances, and later he would
pan from Kirk Douglas and John Wayne
to shrewd scene stealing by Jo Van Fleet and Colleen Dewhurst.
This book—culled from family albums, letters, production logs, and
interviews with Sturges during the two years prior to his death in 1992—is
offered not as a reappraisal of the action auteur but rather as a long-overdue
appraisal. The scholarship on John Sturges, often confused with Preston Sturges,
is as haphazard at it is patronizing. In the words of assistant director Robert E.
Relyea, who would serve as production chief for Sturges’s Alpha Company, “It’s
a crime what has happened to John’s legacy: He’s the most underrated director in
the history of Hollywood.”
He is also—with DVD re-releases, cable retrospectives, and Hollywood’s
return to stylized heroics—a filmmaker who speaks to a generation reared on
high-concept escapes. Though they seldom impressed
the Academy or brought the critical establishment to its feet, Sturges’s later films
can be seen as the forerunners of such blockbusters as Raiders of the Lost Ark