Escape Artist: The Life and Films of John Sturges

9. Gun for Hire

9 Gun for Hire L ike Richard Brooks and Robert Wise, the forty-six-year-old Sturges was now officially a gun for hire who could demand creative input and more money, if not a percentage of the profits. Appropriately, four of his next six freelance assignments would be Westerns, including the box-office triumph Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) and the grim, unheralded Last Train from Gun Hill (1958). Both films starred Kirk Douglas and were produced by Hal Wallis, whom Sturges called “one of the brightest producers that ever was.” During this almost four-year interim, besides The Old Man and the Sea, Sturges directed Backlash (1956), with Richard Widmark and Donna Reed; The Law and Jake Wade (1958), with Widmark and Robert Taylor; and the guerrilla-warfare saga Never So Few (1959), with Frank Sinatra, Gina Lollobrigida, and Steve McQueen. In early 1958, as MGM sorted through the logistical challenges of the latter—should it be done on location in Burma or on the backlot?—Sturges performed an uncredited patch job on Universal’s Saddle the Wind, a psychological Western scripted by Rod Serling, directed by Robert Parrish, and costarring Robert Taylor and John Cassavetes as brothers. Sturges was brought in for two days of retakes and blue-screen inserts, which now made it appear that the trigger-happy Cassavetes commits suicide in the climactic face-off with his brother. Sturges waived his fee as a courtesy to the film’s producer, Armand Deutsch. 143 Sturges’s hard-fought freedom would prove bittersweet. In the winter of 1955, Grace, who had miraculously survived a massive heart attack four years earlier, died in a San Fernando nursing home. She was eighty-two. The L.A. Times identified her as “the mother of film producer Preston Sturges.” (The next edition corrected the error.) Grandson Jon Stufflebeem remembered visiting Grace in the hospital after the first heart attack. She was emaciated, confined to an oxygen tent, but still a presence to be reckoned with. “She made me go to her purse and take out $20 to buy a pair of shoes,” he recalled. “She wasn’t supposed to survive, but she fought her way back, and they put her first in an assisted-care facility in Santa Monica and then a nursing home full of famous Hollywood people who were all ‘old soaks.’” So he could be close by, John had gotten his mother, a teetotaler, a suite in the Motion Picture Retirement Home in Woodland Hills. In February 1956, Sturges signed with Universal-International to direct the “vengeance trail” Western Backlash, developed by Widmark and Borden Chase (Red River) from a novel by Frank Gruber. Sturges’s salary for the thirty-four-day shoot was $56,800, plus a generous per diem. There was also the allure of Arizona locations, some of which he had visited as a child. After studio interiors, the company moved to a ranch in Nogales and the façade town of Old Tucson, whose Main Street figured prominently in Arizona and Winchester 73. The location shoot was hot (107 degrees at one point) and not without mishap. A stagecoach overturned during a tricky maneuver, resulting in broken bones and contusions, and a light reflector fell from a roof, sending the cinematographer to the hospital. The $1 million production came in three days behind schedule and about $25,000 over budget. Originally titled “Fort Starvation”—which sounded more like a boxof fice forecast—the mystery-Western played on viewer expectations from the opening shot: the archetypal lone rider turns out to be a woman, Karyl Orton (Reed). What follows involves lost gold and the search for the mysterious “sixth man,” whom Jim Slater (Widmark) believes left his father and four others to be massacred by Indians. His investigation leads to the cavalry, warring Apaches, a gunslinger named Johnny (William Campbell of The People against O’Hara), and a range war between a former Civil War major (Roy Roberts) and a slick cattle thief named Bonniwell (John McIntire), who turns out to be Slater’s 144 Gun for Hire 1 father, setting the scene for a showdown with Oedipal overtones. (As originally written, after the ranchers shot it out, the father, son, and girlfriend walked off into the sunset, presumably to a life of crime. This was changed to Bonniwell being killed—first by his...