John Sturges

John Eliot Sturges (3 January 1911 –  18 August 1992) was an American film director. He was known as "The dean of big-budget action movies made during the 1950s and 1960s". His movies include The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Ice Station Zebra and Marooned. He started in Hollywood in 1932 as an editor. In World War II he started directing documentaries and training films for the US Army Air Corps. Sturges's mainstream directorial career began in 1946 with The Man Who Dared, the first of many B-movies. He made imaginative use of the widescreen CinemaScope format by placing Spencer Tracy alone against a vast desert panorama in the suspense film Bad Day at Black Rock for which he received a Best Director Oscar nomination in 1955.
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