John Sturges | |
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Born | John Eliot Sturges January 3, 1910 Oak Park, Illinois, U.S. |
Died | August 18, 1992 82) | (aged
Occupation | Film director |
John Eliot Sturges ( /ˈstɜːrdʒɪs/ ; January 3, 1910 – August 18, 1992) was an American film director. His films include Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Great Escape (1963), and Ice Station Zebra (1968). In 2013, The Magnificent Seven and 2018, Bad Day at Black Rock were selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". [1]
Sturges started his career in Hollywood as an editor in 1932. During World War II, Sturges directed documentaries and training films as a captain in the United States Army Air Forces. [2] Sturges's mainstream directorial career began with The Man Who Dared (1946), the first of many B movies. In the suspense film Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), he made imaginative use of the widescreen CinemaScope format by placing Spencer Tracy alone against a vast desert panorama, receiving a Best Director Oscar nomination for the film. Over the course of his career, Sturges developed a reputation for elevated character-based drama within the confines of genre filmmaking. He was awarded the Golden Boot Award in 1992 for his lifetime contribution to Westerns.
He once met Akira Kurosawa, who told him that he loved The Magnificent Seven (which was a remake of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai ). Sturges considered this the proudest moment of his professional career. [3] The Magnificent Seven was an inductee in the 2013 National Film Registry list. [4] Sturges commented that its popularity is due in part as a springboard for several young actors, transporting the locale from Japan to Mexico, putting a twist into the career of Yul Brynner, and having part of its score used as the Marlboro cigarette commercial theme. [5]
Burton Stephen Lancaster was an American actor and producer. Initially known for playing tough guys with a tender heart, he went on to achieve success with more complex and challenging roles over a 45-year career in film and, later, television. He was a four-time nominee for the Academy Award for Best Actor, and he also won two BAFTA Awards and one Golden Globe Award for Best Lead Actor. The American Film Institute ranks Lancaster as #19 of the greatest male stars of classic Hollywood cinema.
Clarence LeRoy Van Cleef Jr. was an American actor best known for his roles in Spaghetti Westerns such as For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. In his film debut, High Noon, he was asked to have his nose altered to play a sympathetic character. However, after declining this request he was relegated to a non-speaking outlaw cast role. Van Cleef was often typecast as a minor villain for the majority of his career, proposedly due to his physical features. After suffering serious injuries in a car crash, Van Cleef's acting career started to decline. However, Sergio Leone offered him a major role in For a Few Dollars More. The film proved to be a huge hit and cited him as a box-office draw, largely in Europe.
Seven Samurai, released in the United States initially as The Magnificent Seven, is a 1954 Japanese epic samurai drama film co-written, edited, and directed by Akira Kurosawa. The story takes place in 1586 during the Sengoku period of Japanese history. It follows the story of a village of desperate farmers who hire seven rōnin to combat bandits who will return after the harvest to steal their crops.
The Magnificent Seven is a 1960 American Western film directed by John Sturges. The screenplay by William Roberts is a remake – in an Old West–style – of Akira Kurosawa's 1954 Japanese film Seven Samurai. The ensemble cast includes Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn, Brad Dexter, James Coburn, and Horst Buchholz as a group of seven gunfighters, and Eli Wallach as their main antagonist. The seven title characters are hired to protect a small village in Mexico from a group of marauding bandits, led by Wallach.
The Informer is a 1935 American drama thriller film directed and produced by John Ford, adapted by Dudley Nichols from the novel of the same title by Irish novelist Liam O'Flaherty. Set in 1922, the plot concerns the underside of the Irish War of Independence and centers on a disgraced Republican man, played by Victor McLaglen, who anonymously informs on his former comrades and spirals into guilt as his treachery becomes known. Heather Angel, Preston Foster, Margot Grahame, Wallace Ford, Una O'Connor and J. M. Kerrigan co-star. The novel had previously been adapted for a British film The Informer (1929).
The Western is a genre of film and other fiction set primarily in the latter half of the 19th century or early 20th century in the Western United States, commonly referred to as the "Old West" or the "Wild West".
The Lady Eve is a 1941 American screwball comedy film written and directed by Preston Sturges and starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda.
My Darling Clementine is a 1946 American Western film directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp during the period leading up to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. The ensemble cast also features Victor Mature, Linda Darnell, Walter Brennan, Tim Holt, Cathy Downs and Ward Bond.
Bad Day at Black Rock is a 1955 American neo-Western film directed by John Sturges with screenplay by Millard Kaufman. It stars Spencer Tracy and Robert Ryan with support from Anne Francis, Dean Jagger, Walter Brennan, John Ericson, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin. The film is a crime drama set in 1945 that contains elements of the revisionist Western genre. In the plot, a one-armed stranger (Tracy) comes to a small desert town and uncovers an evil secret that has corrupted the entire community.
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is a 1957 American Western film starring Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday, and loosely based on the actual event in 1881. The film was directed by John Sturges from a screenplay written by novelist Leon Uris.
Brad Dexter was an American actor and film producer. He is known for tough-guy and western roles, including the 1960 film The Magnificent Seven (1960), and producing several films for Sidney J. Furie such as Lady Sings the Blues. He is also known for a short marriage to Peggy Lee, a friendship with Marilyn Monroe and for saving Frank Sinatra from drowning. Dexter's tough-guy roles contrasted with his easygoing and friendly real-life personality.
Charles Bryant Lang Jr., A.S.C. was an American cinematographer.
East Asian cinema is cinema produced in East Asia or by people from this region. It is part of Asian cinema, which in turn is part of world cinema.
Jeopardy is a 1953 American crime drama directed by John Sturges. The black-and-white film stars Barbara Stanwyck and Barry Sullivan as a married couple, and Ralph Meeker as an escaped convict. The film was based on a 22-minute radio play, "A Question of Time".
Hour of the Gun is a 1967 Western film depicting Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday during their 1881 battles against Ike Clanton and his brothers in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and the gunfight's aftermath in and around Tombstone, Arizona, starring James Garner as Earp, Jason Robards as Holliday, and Robert Ryan as Clanton. The film was directed by John Sturges.
Ferris Maynard Webster was an American film editor with approximately seventy-two film credits. He was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Film Editing for his work on Blackboard Jungle (1955), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), and The Great Escape (1963).
Joe Kidd is a 1972 American Western film in Panavision starring Clint Eastwood and Robert Duvall, written by Elmore Leonard and directed by John Sturges.
Rashomon is the name of several different stage productions, all ultimately derived from works by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.
Walter Riml was an Austrian cameraman and actor.
The Rusty film series comprises eight American films produced for young audiences between 1945 and 1949 by Columbia Pictures. Child actor Ted Donaldson stars as Danny Mitchell in the series, which relates the adventures of a German Shepherd dog named Rusty. The role of Rusty was played by Ace the Wonder Dog in the first feature, Adventures of Rusty (1945). A police dog named Rip took over the role for the second film, The Return of Rusty (1946). In the later films Rusty was played by Flame, a charismatic dog star who was featured in three separate series.
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