John Sturges as an Auteur Anonymous College

Director John Sturges (1910-1992) is today best known for action movies such as The Great Escape (1963) and The Magnificent Seven(1960), but the hallmarks of his style are evident in every one of his films, and particularly evident in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1967). Although he has been dismissed as a mere action filmmaking, the use of editing in Sturges’ work exemplifies and anticipates the form of New American filmmaking that would become popular several decades later. Therefore, his work is more artistic than people have traditionally given him credit for. The prominence of auteur theory in film theory helps to explain a way of looking at film in which the director of the film is seen as the principal author.

Auteurism “…was a product of several ideas which coalesced in French film criticism at the end of the forties…” (Hess 29). This lens of film theory, according to some, was what gave the critical project of film theory academic credence since it began “…by referring back to an essentially literary and Romantic conception of the artist as the central, even the sole source of meaning in the text” (Stoddart 39). The end result was a film theory that granted especial autonomy to the director of a film and that “...