One of the fun parts of a movie critic's job is the opportunity to rediscover a writer, director, character actor or what have you who has been mostly ignored in the broad sweep of film history. That's what the great French New Wave critics of the late '40s and early '50s did, pointing out to the world that many so-called "Hollywood hacks" were in fact great artists who happened to pound the same nail over and over again.

John Sturges is mostly forgotten today even though he made more films that became staples of the action canon than just about anybody else. They weren't great films, just masculine, violent male-bonding exercises that hold up amazingly well, decades after their premiere.

He was behind the camera for "The Magnificent Seven," "The Great Escape" and "Ice Station Zebra." His best picture was almost certainly "Bad Day at Black Rock," but Sturges also did solid work on "The Old Man and the Sea," "Hour of the Gun," "Marooned" (an early NASA rescue-in-space thriller) and "Joe Kidd."

Glenn Lovell, who for years was film critic at the Mercury News, brings Sturges back into the limelight with the breezy bio "Escape Artist: The Life and Films of John Sturges."

The action director was most at home on manly sets with other men (something he shared with Victor Fleming, Howard Hawks, John Ford and Walter Hill, among many others). He wrestled with scripts, let the actors work out how to do what they were going to do and then

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figured out where to set up his camera. He had worked as an editor, "color consultant" and sometime cameraman before taking his place in the big chair, and his films reveal that apprentice-craftsman background.

One reason a hokey western like "The Magnificent Seven" or a standard-issue POW movie like "The Great Escape" still works is the efficiency of his storytelling and his deft handling of reliable, tried-and-true moments.

Film buffs may want to skip to chapters on the making of movies they know best, and Lovell's book invites that, even as it pulls readers in to exploring the background that made Sturges the moviemaker he was. The backstage gossip — the Yul Brynner-Anthony Quinn feud, the Steve McQueen attempts to upstage everybody, the stunts, the happy accidents — will summon memories at every turn for those familiar with these movies.

Where Lovell's book really scores, however, is in covering new ground. How much do any of us know about how the "Seven" were cast, what enticed/tricked Spencer Tracy into being the "Old Man" or the one-armed vet in "Bad Day at Black Rock" (or how difficult he really was), why it took Sturges — who filmed World War II documentaries in the United States and Europe, a real vet, in other words — to do justice to "The Great Escape"?

After reading these accounts, you may find yourself wanting to dive into the Sturges catalog and see some of his actioners you've missed. Even though less colorful than Sam Peckinpah and less of a self-mythologizer than Hawks, Sturges almost certainly deserves a spot in the pantheon, as a filmmaker who could get good actors to give good performances in great, enduring yarns.

Escape
Artist: 
The Life 
and Films 
of John Sturges

By Glenn Lovell
University of 
Wisconsin Press, 352 pp., 
$60, $26.95 paperback