John Sturges

Xan Brooks opens a line of transmission with John Sturges in his British Film Institute piece: the attempt to carry eastern codes into the modern western runs, by his account, from Sturges to Jean-Pierre Melville and on to John Frankenheimer. All three links sit in our catalogue, The Magnificent Seven under his name, Le Samourai under Melville's, Ronin under Frankenheimer's, so the chain is checkable even where the influence itself is not. Kim Newman calls The Great Escape the one prisoner-of-war picture an international audience will recognise, Geoffrey Macnab describes Bad Day at Black Rock as a magnificent late western, and Richard Falcon counts him alongside John Ford as a benchmark for landscape. Both of the first two writers date their film a year ahead of our records, 1962 for the escape picture and 1954 for the other.