John Sturges

As I have mentioned before, one of the first, or possibly the first, VHS tape I ever bought was Ice Station Zebra (1968), directed by John Sturges. I still have the tape, even though it has been at least 15 years since I had a VHS player. Sturges matters to me. While he was not as important as, for example, Alfred Hitchcock for my developing interest in films, he has always been a presence in a way no other filmmaker has been. I cannot explain this in any logical way, but I imagine it is related to the significant impact seeing some of his films had on me at a young, impressionable age. Besides Ice Station Zebra, there was also Kind Lady (1951), Jeopardy (1953), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), The Great Escape (1963), Hour of the Gun (1967), The Eagle Has Landed (1976). I watched them on TV whenever I had the chance, as I knew that if John Sturges were the director I would not be disappointed. Once I watched Joe Kidd (1972) with my grandmother, an unapologetic fan of Clint Eastwood, but she was sadly disappointed with that one.

The reason for why I am writing this now is that I have just read Dreams of Flight: The Great Escape In American Film and Culture, a new book by film scholar Dana Polan about the backstory, production, reception, and influence of The Great Escape, but it is also autobiographical; how Polan saw the film when he was a boy (at a drive-in), how it changed him, has followed him through his life, and how he felt compelled to write a book about it. Earlier this year I also read Sheila O'Malley's blog post, about Sturges, which also has that autobiographical aspect to it.

It is not just us. All through my childhood, my dad spoke about three films that had made an impact on him. The Ox-bow Incident (1943), The Magnificent Seven (1960), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). As you can see, they were all westerns and one of them was by Sturges, The Magnificent Seven. Even before I started to watch the films myself, I had already been introduced to one of them.

Alfonso Cuarón is another one for whom having watched a film by Sturges in their youth made a big impression. In his case it was Marooned (1969), which, not by chance, the characters in his autobiographical film Roma (2018) also go to the cinema to watch.

Paul Thomas Anderson has spoken of Sturges's Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), and the quality of Sturges's audio commentary to its Laserdisc release. What he said was "You can learn more from John Sturges’ audio track on the ‘Bad Day at Black Rock’ laserdisc than you can in 20 years of film school." (Confusingly there are several versions of this quote floating around on the internet, some inaccurate. What I just quoted is word for word what he said in an interview in the Los Angeles Times. You can listen to Sturges's commentary here.)

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The earliest of Sturges's films that I have seen is from 1949, The Walking Hills, which is quite good. Next year's The Capture (1950) is very good. The People Against O'Hara (1951), with Spencer Tracy as a struggling attorney and John Alton as the cinematographer, is a fine drama. These were years in which Sturges could make 3 - 4 films a year, and several of the early films I have not seen, including interesting ones like Mystery Street (1950) and Right Cross (1950). But it seems his career settled on a more focused and deliberate trajectory in 1953, when he made the western Escape from Fort Bravo, with William Holden. Soon this became his defining kind of film, together with war movies, and I have seen almost every film he made after 1953. I would speculate that he was attracted to such films because they gave him plenty of opportunity to shoot widescreen films outdoors, and also to work with ensemble casts of men working together. He was also interested in history, not least American history. Some of the highlights are Bad Day at Black Rock, Backlash (1956), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, The Law and Jake Wade (1958), The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, and Hour of the Gun. Another one I like a lot is A Girl Named Tamiko (1962), which is thematically unusual as it is a contemporary love story, focused on a man and a woman. (Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is also something of a love story, but between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday.)

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There is not that much written about Sturges, but in the books and articles I have read it is often the case that the writer(s) discuss whether he can be considered an auteur or not, and there are often complaints about how Andrew Sarris was unfair to him. I find this tiresome. As I have written about earlier, I think we would be better off not using the term, or concept, of auteur as few seem to even know what it means. At least there is no consensus about what it means. (Which is true for many common terms used by film scholars and critics.) Sturges's films have a recognisable style across his oeuvre, and there are thematic consistencies as well as similarities regarding tone, style of acting, and pacing, and if you want to call him an auteur that is easy to justify. But what is gained by this? It has no bearing on the quality of the films. To get an example of this confusion, this is what Polan says in his book I mentioned above: "It is important, I think, not to turn Sturges into some sort of auteur imagined as working to express a deep metaphysics that somehow was engrained into these films made for the business of entertainment." (p. 79) No part of that sentence makes sense. Since Polan elsewhere in the books writes about the stylistic and thematic concepts he finds consistent throughout Sturges's body of work, his definition of what an auteur is must be different than how it is usually conceived. I do not know what he means by "a deep metaphysics" that is "engrained into" the films, or who has said that this is what it means to be an auteur. Or is Polan mocking people who make that argument? If so, who are these people he is mocking? And he seems to think that there is some contradiction between being an auteur and doing films "made for the business of entertainment." But if that is a contradiction, it is one that Polan himself has invented. Either way, arguing about whether Sturges is an auteur or not is pointless, since it has little to do with Sturges and primarily to do with what you mean with the word auteur, or what you think others mean by it.

 

The Law and Jake Wade

Joe Kidd

What is the style of Sturges? The images are clean, clear, spread out, uncluttered, spacious, whether indoors or outdoors. He is one of the great masters of the widescreen shot. Even in earlier films before the emergence of CinemaScope and other wide formats, such as The People Against O'Hara, he composed in width as well as depth; as if he spent those early years just waiting for a widescreen format to emerge. If I am not mistaken, all the films he made from 1953 have been in various widescreen formats, whether CinemaScope or Panavision or something else. His favoured way of filming has a stylised element to it, and it frequently involves a lack of people. The streets of his towns are usually empty, because that is how he wants his shots to be. When he made Bad Day at Black Rock, one demand he had was that he would not use any extras. The only people in the shots would be the characters who really had to be there. This makes the shots and street scenes unrealistic, but that is his way of filming, not just in Bad Day at Black Rock (below) but in general.

The streets are however crowded in The Hallelujah Trail (1965), but then that whole film is a crowded mess, a rare attempt by Sturges to be funny and boisterous. It is amiable but tiresome. But it is an exception. His characters otherwise seem to exist in isolation, and they are usually not just alone but lonely. This is a recurring thing in his films, loneliness. The most famous scenes from his films, such as Steve McQueen on a bike or in a cell (the cooler) in The Great Escape, are usually of people being alone and isolated. Consider a scene in the beginning of Sturges's penultimate film, McQ (1974). A cop in civilian clothes walks into a diner, uses the restroom to wash his hands, and then walks out to the counter and orders a glass of milk. He is the only customer in the place and the man who works there is primarily out of sight in the kitchen, so most of the sequence is just a lone man in a large diner having a glass of milk. It is true that several of his famous films are of a group of men working together, but they are still isolated, whether in jail, in space, or on a submarine, and their exchanges are rarely on a personal level. At the end of the film they will either have died alone or they will have split up. Companionship is not a lasting thing in Sturges's films. Has there ever been another American filmmaker for whom loneliness is such a central theme?

The outdoors are overwhelming too, and the characters, or some small town or hamlet in which they live, are dwarfed by mountains, trees, and the sky. Sturges likes to use a crane, and to move the camera both sideways and up and down, to make the shots fluid and to capture the vastness of nature. But action scenes, like fights or shootouts, are carefully choreographed and often done in a brief outburst, filmed with a fixed camera. He liked to prepare his shot in advance, doing diagrams and calculating angles. He had an engineer's interest in such things, and cutting was an important part of it too. (One person he worked most often with was the editor Ferris Webster, who cut some 15 of Sturges's films.) Hour of the Gun is his most extreme film in terms of style, so stylised that it reaches some kind of poetic abstraction, where everything not essential has been stripped away. The same is true for The Satan Bug (1965). I would say that these two films are his most abstract in style, but The Satan Bug is unfortunately not a good film, as the story is too ridiculous and incoherent. But through its spare, bare style, which includes the acting, it becomes a fascinating exercise just the same, more like a blueprint of a film than an actual film.

The world depicted in his films is a rough and hostile place, which Sturges's depicts without almost any traces of sentimentality. If you focus on what matters you might make it, and even if you do not make it, you might still have recovered your self-respect and die as a proud man, knowing you did the best you could. That is one reason some of his films are something of an emotional paradox, they are tragedies yet they can be simultaneously uplifting. But usually, they are more sad than uplifting. Some, like Last Train from Gun Hill (1959), end in darkness. Many of the films also end with the question "Was whatever was done worth all the pain it caused?" Sometimes a character explicitly asks it, sometimes it is unspoken, but the question is almost always there.

 

Hour of the Gun

One filmmaker I think would make for an interesting compare/contrast is Anthony Mann. They have for one thing a similar career trajectory: both started doing B-movies in the 1940s, then noirs with cinematographer John Alton, and then primarily making westerns and war films with bigger budgets and stars. They are downbeat, they do not do comedies or musicals, and rarely domestic films, and their westerns are psychological, focused on characters in turmoil or bent on revenge. There are also visual similarities, and they are excellent at staging fight sequences. But Mann is by far the greater director. There are more depth and complexities in his films, and in the performances he gets, and the visual style is more inventive and striking, especially when indoors. But I would have to spend more time with their films simultaneously to strengthen my argument. For now, I just add that two lesser-known westerns by Sturges, Backlash (written by Borden Chase who also worked with Mann on several occasions) and The Law and Jake Wade, are particularly close to Mann and they are among Sturges's best films. Yet they are not as good as Mann's best films. (Here is my earlier article about Mann.)

Speaking of compare and contrast, Sturges's By Love Possessed (1961), a for him uncharacteristic soap opera about love, family, and generational conflict, would make for an interesting triple feature with Henry King's This Earth is Mine (1959) and Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind (1956). To add to the relevance of comparing them, they were all shot by Russell Metty. "I had no business making it." Sturges said.

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In an early scene in The Magnificent Seven, Steve McQueen and Yul Brynner's characters Vin and Chris are talking. McQueen's Vin asks where Chris is heading. "I'm drifting south more or less." he says. "Where are you heading?" "Oh me, I'm just drifting." says Vin. That to me felt like a life-goal worth pursuing at the time, and when I went on my first trip around the world, in 2001, I had calling cards made out on which I had printed my name, email address, and as my profession "Drifter". Such is the influence of Sturges on me. Alas, the days of drifting around the world seem to be over. Maybe when I retire... Until then I at least have Sturges's films for strength and company, even if they rarely provide much comfort.

The Magnificent Seven

 

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Some selected readings:

Books:

Lovell, Glenn, Escape Artist - The Life and Films of John Sturges (2008)

Polan, Dana, Dreams of Flight: The Great Escape In American Film and Culture (2021)

Reframing Cult Westerns: From The Magnificent Seven to the Hateful Eight, editor Lee Broughton (2020)

Articles:

Bengtsson, Åke, "John Sturges" (1962) in Chaplin

O'Malley, Sheila, "'I think I'm a pretty good storyteller.' - John Sturges" (2020) in http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=164847

Me about Anthony Mann: https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2018/01/anthony-mann.html 

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)

What do you care about Black Rock?

I don't care anything about Black Rock. Only it just seems to me that there aren't many towns like this in America. But one town like it is enough. And because I think something kind of bad happened here, Miss Wirth, something I can't seem to find a handle to.

You don't know what you're talking about.

Well, I know this much. The rule of law has left here and the guerrillas have taken over.

The Americans and the Japanese have had an awkward relationship ever since 1853 when Commodore Perry's gunboats opened up Japan to the outside world and brought the Tokugawa Shogunate to an end. They are now close allies but in the 1980s USA was convinced that Japan would take over as the number one power and buy up America (a fear which can be seen in films as diverse as Gung Ho (Ron Howard 1986) and Die Hard (John McTiernan 1988)), and during the 1930s they were enemies and fought each other during World War 2, after which the US occupied Japan until 1952. Many films have been made about the war in the Pacific between 1941 and 1945, including John Ford's They Were Expendable (1945). Considerably fewer films have been made about what happened with the Japanese who were in the US during the war, and the Japanese-Americans. One of those rare films is Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges 1955).

It is set in 1945 and takes places during 24 hours, from when the Southern Pacific makes a brief and unexpected stop at Black Rock (stopping for the first time in four years) until the train comes along the same time the next day, again making a brief and unexpected stop. In between a stranger, Macreedy, played by Spencer Tracy, has been forced to take on almost the whole town as the people in it first want him to leave and then want to kill him. Once something bad happened in Black Rock and ever since the town has been walking dead, consumed by fear and guilt. For some Macreedy is seen as a threat but to others as a chance for redemption.

The town's unofficial leader as a man called Smith, played by Robert Ryan, and he is clearly responsible for the bad thing that happened, whatever it was. Macreedy has come to Black Rock to visit the father of a friend, a Japanese man called Komoko. But he is not there anymore and his place has been burned to the ground. In one particularly powerful sequence Macreedy is trying to coax Smith into admitting that he killed Komoko, and that he killed him only because he was Japanese. Macreedy is gentle, soft-spoken and sitting down, Smith is tense, aggravated and standing up, menacing.

The film was shot on location in the dry, hot inland of California, close to where during the war there had been a relocation camp in which thousands of Japanese-Americans had been locked up. This is also something that comes up in the dialogue. The different men in the town all have their different reasons for why they acted like they did, and now act like they do. For Smith it is a combination of disappointment (for not being accepted by the army when he tried to enlist) and pure racism; hatred of the Japanese. But it is also because he knows that his way of life and his breed is doomed, they have no place in a modern, post-war America. In some ways he is related to Ethan Edwards in Ford's The Searchers (1956), another embittered man for whom there is no place in a post-war era. (It is also possible to draw a connection to the Bundy gang who are currently occupying a wildlife refuge in Oregon.) But he is not unique, and maybe he is called Smith to emphasise how ordinary he is. He could be anybody.

Perhaps unexpectedly this is a MGM production, produced by Dore Schary, who was keen on having his liberal inclinations seen in the films he produced. Bad Day at Black Rock had a pointed progressive political message, and the heads at the studio were not keen on it, but Schary prevailed. It was also MGM's first film in CinemaScope, and likewise its director John Sturges' first film in that format. Sturges said he would do it on condition that he was left alone on set, and he did get to make it his way. One thing he did was to get rid of all the extras. The only people seen in the film are the main characters, except for the first and last scene. Sturges did not want any distractions in his compositions, and they are powerful. He is one of the great Scope directors, a natural for compositions, and this was obvious already here in his first try. It looks spectacular, and Sturges seems to be thrilled by what he can do with the wide frame and frequently, by his staging and blocking, draws attention to the images so that they become like still lifes. In some scenes it is as if Sturges suddenly freezes the action for a few seconds, like in this impromptu meeting between several men in a series of elaborately composed shots. The point is not so much what they are talking about as for Sturges to show what he can do, and what the format can do.

The script by Millard Kaufman, is very good, and the dialogue as well, but it is Sturges's handling of the material that makes the film the great work of art that it is.

There is one absence in the film: they all speak of the Japanese but no one is seen, which is part of the force of the film. They are not there anymore because bad things happen in places like Black Rock.

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For those who wish to explore more of Sturges at his best there is The Law and Jake Wade (1958) and The Hour of the Gun (1967).

Here are two earlier related articles:
On the two Sturges, Preston and John.
On The Great Escape (1963).

Another recommended film is House of Bamboo (Sam Fuller 1955), see accompanying post here.

The Law and Jake Wade

Sturges vs. Sturges

When people talk about a filmmaker called Sturges it can automatically be assumed that they refer to Preston Sturges. Conventional wisdom has it that Preston Sturges is the important one and John Sturges is "the other Sturges". However, I think the differences between the Sturges' are interesting and is about something essential in cinema, and what we value in the art form. What is valued in Preston Sturges is dialogue, humour, satire, characters and plotting, more of literary qualities. His films are extraordinarily quotable, his characters are rich and vivid, down to the smallest part (a thesis could be written about his bartenders), he tells ingenious, convoluted stories, and his satire can be both brave and dark. Nobody is safe from his sharp tongue and raised eyebrow and for at least eight years, from The Great McGinty (1940) to Unfaithfully Yours (1948), he was a one-man show in Hollywood, a writer-director-producer who made films that were very much his films.

But he has not made a film that is better than John Sturges's best films; Bad Day at Black Rock (1955, image above), a tense drama attacking racism and the treatment of Japanese Americans, and Hour of the Gun (1967, image below), a bitter and wise film with extraordinary music by Jerry Goldsmith. John Sturges had a strong visual sense and when he had the right script and a good cast he could do great things. His compositions are often striking, many of his films have shots and images that are far beyond anything found in Preston's films, and few have such a firm command of the widescreen image. There is real beauty in the geometrical precision with which he can stage and frame a shot. In addition, the ensemble acting in many of his films is remarkable, how the group becomes one. There is also, often, a peculiar mood to the films; as I have said earlier he is good at being uplifting and downbeat at the same time. Besides the two high points already mentioned other fine films of his are The Capture (1950, an independent production from his early, pre-widescreen, days), Backlash (1956), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Great Escape (1963).

So neither of the Sturges' is ideal, but both have great strengths; for one it is the written word, for the other the visuals. There is room for both.

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Preston Sturges is not really like anybody else, but it is tempting to put John Sturges together with Richard Fleischer (whom I wrote about four years ago here). A topic for another day. Andrew Sarris put both in the "Strained Seriousness" category but they are more than that.

Backlash, with its story (by Borden Chase) of a man hunting the man he believes is responsible for the death of his father, only to find out in the end that it is the other way around, that his father is a killer, is very good but it makes you wonder what Anthony Mann might have done with it. Mann is a much greater artist than any of those mentioned in this post.

The Great Escape (1963)

The Great Escape is a number of things. It is a POW-film, it is a war film, it is a buddy film while also an ensemble piece, and a film about resilience and the urge for freedom. And based on a true story, although, as is usually the case, the true story has been altered for various reasons. Some changes have been made for efficiency, some for drama, some on requests from the real people involved, and some out of convenience I suppose. But the basic facts are the same, hundreds of allied prisoners worked together to escape from a German prison camp in 1944. 76 managed to escape before the guards sounded the alarm.

The real escape project took about a year, making the film took about four months and the film is three hours long, and it is never dull. It takes its time, being methodological and patient, but it gives time for the characters to grow and learn, to befriend each other and interact, and share moments of both joy and terror. In that respect it is a very humane film, where even the German commander of the camp (played by Hannes Messemer) is a human being, trying to be kind and just and often appalled by the horrors and loss of life that is part of war. That the characters are almost all played by big stars, British and American, does not matter for with the exception of Steve McQueen they all become their parts and disappear into the group. Among them are James Garner, James Donald, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, David McCallum, Donald Pleasence and James Coburn.

The force behind the film is John Sturges, who produced and directed it at the height of his career, riding on the success of Magnificent Seven (1960), and he was intimately involved in all aspects of the film. To some extent it was his baby, and the decision to shoot it in Germany instead of in Hollywood is undoubtedly a big factor in the film's appeal. It was a very complex project, logistically (for example they built a whole prison camp outside Munich) and personally, with a lot of issues and difficulties among the cast. It is not Sturges's best film but it shows his skills and his particular concerns (like how the film manages to be uplifting and downbeat at the same time).

Sturges had problems with Steve McQueen who apparently was very insecure, and testy, on set. But that does not come off in the film as he is one of the best things about it, if not the best thing. He stands out because his character Hilts is a loner, who spends most of his time in "the cooler", an isolation cell, where he sits for days on end throwing his baseball. (Hence he was called "the cooler king" in the film, which may have led to McQueen being called "the king of cool".) The story was changed to a large degree to accommodate McQueen and the sequence with him on a motorcycle was invented, almost on set, and a good thing too because that sequence is a highlight of the film. The whole film is, as I said, about resilience and the urge for freedom, and nothing captures this like Hilts stealing a Triumph from a German soldier and heading for the Swiss border. There are several things here that work together. The fact that it is real, no digital effects or studios, but McQueen on a motorcycle in Germany (the actual jump through barbed wire was done by Bud Ekins for insurance reasons) is one thing. Another is the way the landscape and the motorcycle work together. Sturges keeps the camera far from the action and pans left and right to show how small the men and their vehicles are compared to the mountains and the hills. And then there is the sense of freedom, in two ways. Hilts alone on his bike, instead of in an isolation cell, is one aspect of freedom, physical freedom. The other is more spiritual. He does not make it, he gets caught in the barbed wire and is captured by the Germans, but in the moment of defeat he smiles. The Germans may have captured his person but his spirit is not caught or broken. He has not given up. He will live on, to fight and to escape again.

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An earlier post about Steve McQueen is here. For another post about human resilience see the one about Gravity. There will be more about John Sturges in a post next year.

This post is part of a join venture for Filmspanarna, a collection of film bloggers from Sweden. Here are links to the other participants posts on The Great Escape. The first is in English, the others in Swedish.
The Velvet Café, Jojjenito, Rörliga bilder och tryckta ord, Movies-Noir, Moving Landscape, Fiffi.We saw the film at Cinemateket in Stockholm so we could experience it on a very big screen.