Word: cooperation
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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They Came to Cordura (William Goetz; Columbia), based on the 1958 bestseller by Glendon Swarthout, is a big, flashy, $4,000,000 Gary Cooper western. Its primary purpose is to grab the top dollar in the November movie market, but incidentally it tries to "put [its] hand," as the script proclaims, "on the bare heart of heroism." Director Robert Rossen, who wrote the script with Ivan Moffat, never gets quite that close to the mystery of courage. But he does examine the nature and conduct of a hero at considerable depth, and he finds in his moral conflicts a stronger...
...story begins south of the border on March 8, 1916 during the expedition against Pancho Villa. Mild, middle-aged Hero Cooper is a major in the U.S. Cavalry who at his first brush with the enemy "yellows out" and hides in a ditch while his men fight and die. For the sake of Cooper's father, a famous name in the Cavalry, the C.O. conceals the son's disgrace, assigns him to special duty as an awards officer. The coward, by a truly profound stroke of irony, is set up as the judge of what courage...
...Major Cooper picks his first hero (Michael Callan) in a skirmish, and at the battle of Ojos Azules, a remarkably clear and exciting action sequence, he finds four more (Van Heflin, Tab Hunter, Richard Conte, Dick York). The colonel then puts Cooper and his heroes in charge of a U.S. citizen (Rita Hayworth) accused of giving aid and comfort (of a suggestively unspecified nature) to the enemy, and orders them north to Cordura, three days' ride across a waterless waste. On the way Cooper tells the men that they will be nominated for the Medal of Honor, and asks...
Their answers startle and confuse him. One just hated Mexicans and wanted "to kill me a couple." Another was so scared he did not know what he was doing. The third was hoping to impress his superiors and advance his career. Cooper is even more startled when four of his five heroes calmly refuse the highest honor their country can bestow (one, it turns out, is wanted for murder in Albuquerque, and the publicity would probably hang him). When Cooper refuses their refusals, they t- blackmail. Finally, one of them tries to kill...
...Cooper is frightened, but he cannot give in. His heroes embody for him the esoteric principle, the precious bane that alone can heal his life and save his soul: courage. "They have it. I have to save it." He disarms the lot of them, and sleepless, burning-eyed, with the energy of obsession drives them across the desert, drives them without horses, without food, without water toward a little Spanish town whose name means sanity. And as the cruel days go by, the heroes come to see that the coward is the greater hero, the more deeply courageous man. What...