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At last, a solid book about
unjustly neglected Sturges
of TheColumnists.com
When I first met film critic Glenn Lovell more than 25 years ago, we quickly learned we had at least one thing in common: A deep appreciation of film director John Sturges, whose career was already being sadly neglected by critics even back then.
For many years, Glenn was the film critic for The San Jose Mercury News and I was the paper's television critic. We both were syndicated throughout the U.S. and Canada by Knight Ridder Newspapers. I'm willing to bet Glenn was already churning around some ideas in his head about a book on Sturges way back in the early 1980s.
All these years later, Lovell's book is finally here--and it's still the only book devoted to the work of the man who gave us such unforgettable films as "Bad Day At Black Rock," "Gunfight at the OK Corral," "The Magnificent Seven" and "The Great Escape." It has a great title, too: "Escape Artist: The Life and Films of John Sturges" ($26.95, University of Wisconsin Press).
I take that title three ways. First, it recognizes that Sturges was a master of grand scale adventure films that millions of moviegoers have used to escape from their own humdrum lives. Second, it makes us think of the most successful of all Sturges' films, the World War II epic "The Great Escape." And, finally, I like to think it symbolized the way Sturges ended his career--walking away from Hollywood after "The Eagle Has Landed" in 1977, escaping to a very private life on his boat in Mexican waters or at his secluded home in San Luis Obispo, Calif.
I always knew Lovell was very well briefed on Sturges' career because we loved to sit around and rap about scenes from the films, especially the westerns, which we both adored. But "Escape Artist" shows a depth of research and knowledge that I never expected since Sturges was a very private guy, wasn't into saving every scrap of information about his work and had died in 1992, long before Glenn had begun to write the book.
But the book turns out to be a treasure trove of Sturges data. Lovell did manage to get several exclusive interviews with Sturges over the years. He also has interviewed scores of people who knew him well and worked with him. But I suppose the real treasures came from Sturges family members who granted Lovell exclusive use of materials seen by few other film scholars. Lovell has tracked down virtually every film Sturges made, including even the more obscure ones made for Columbia Pictures at the start of his career, and has read Sturges' own copies of his scripts, heavily annotated with his own handwritten notes and sketches.
Granted that I was reading a book written by a dear friend about a filmmaker whose work I already appreciated, but the truth is I couldn't put this sucker down. I read it like a hungry man crawling out of the desert and finding a buffet table right in front of him. It's beautifully written and the only errors I caught were trifling ones that I doubt if anyone else will notice.
Lovell portrays Sturges as a man's man--tall, macho and devoted to adventure, perhaps the last of a breed we'll never see again. He learned filmmaking from scratch, starting with a variety of "assistant" jobs at RKO in the 1930s, a fabulous place to learn because that's where Orson Welles, Robert Wise, Mark Robson and so many other great filmmaker got their starts. He made military films during World War II, working under the great William Wyler. Lovell has all these early phases well-detailed in a most readable fashion.
I'm also very happy that Lovell takes the time to turn the spotlight on some of the many excellent films Sturges made that aren't widely known today, among them "The Walking Hills," his 1949 Randolph Scott western; "Jeopardy," his 1953 thriller with Barbara Stanwyck, and "Escape From Fort Bravo," his MGM western of 1953 with William Holden.
But most film lovers are going to gobble up the chapters that deal with Sturges' more famous films and/or collaborators. I was fascinated, for example, by his account of the hard time Sturges had with Howard Hughes, who was running RKO when Sturges made the Jane Russell film "Underwater!" He also has some priceless material on Spencer Tracy, the star of the Sturges film I love most, "Bad Day at Black Rock."
Tracy also was central to the making of Sturges' "The Old Man and the Sea," a strange film with a back story of studio intrigue and disastrous filming incidents that are simply riveting. Did Ernest Hemingway like what Sturges did with his famous book? You'll love that discussion.
The major films get lots of attention, especially "The Magnificent Seven" and "The Great Escape." The anectdotal material about Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson is amazing. Bronson, for instance, met his future wife, actress Jill Ireland, while she was married to actor David McCallum and Sturges, at one point, had to take Bronson aside and urge him not to be fooling around with somebody else's wife while they were working together on a film.
Lovell's account of Sturges' final years as a director convey the sadness that often comes when a great filmmaker finally realizes the business has moved past him and he doesn't have the clout he once had. When you look back at those years with the perspective of time, though, you realize how tough it must have been for Sturges to try and hold onto the reins of his films while working with such powerful figures as Clint Eastwood ("Joe Kidd"), John Wayne ("McQ") and "Chino" (Charles Bronson).
"Escape Artist" is a book for film fans to savor. It will be studied by the new generation of film critics, who may want to go back and look at some of those Sturges films again to see how much they missed. It also will open new doors for Glenn Lovell, who left the crumbling newspaper industry not long after I did, and now is a respected teacher of film courses at the college level. I'll be eager to read the book he chooses to follow this great one.
©2008 by Ron Miller. The book cover illustration is courtesy of the University of Wisconsin. This column first posted Dec. 15, 2008.
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