Word: cordura
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They Came to Cordura. Hollywood's standard brand of horsemeat is dished up with a strong sauce of metaphysics in this Gary Cooper western about a coward who shows the meaning of courage...
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...
...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 them, for personal reasons as well as for Army records, what made them do the heroic things they...
...more deeply courageous man. What they have is physical courage, not to be despised. But what he has is the highest kind of courage, the courage of his spiritual convictions. In the end it is the coward's kind of courage that brings the chastened heroes safely to Cordura...
...Times's Section 10 was a paid ad ($52,000) for Columbia's yet-to-be-released epic, They Came to Cordura, starring Cooper, Hayworth, Van Heflin and Tab Hunter. It was eloquent testimony to Columbia's big bet on Cordura-$250,000 for the book (about "Black Jack" Pershing's punitive expedition against Pancho Villa), $4,500,000 for the production. As for the Sunday Times, it might never completely recover its customary dignity after the headline on the Hayworth article: Sex Goddess Goes Straight. But Columbia feels the ad will "raise the stature...