Word: scripting
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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...
Director Helmut Kautner has taken Karl Zuchmayer's biting leftist script and toned it down, both in political implication and in social description. As the movie proceeds one can see the effect which could have resulted from the blending of abject misery with bitter humor. There are flashes of what must have been really fine pathos on older, flickering, brownish black-and-white film. Blind street singers grind out a Weill-ish ballad, one playing a hand organ, the other tapping a drum with sticks taped to his elbows. A dying consumptive girl cries out in fear of the whiteness...
...Burr closed in on Mason with the tenacity of a man who has landed the big role at last. He studied courtroom procedure, lectured to lawyers' groups even insists that he really wants to get a law degree. It seems a lot of unnecessary effort. According to the script, Perry always wins, and he does not need legal knowledge so much as a passion for digging up evidence and that scowling aggressive courtroom demeanor that eventually forces a confession on the witness stand. Like Gardner, Burr feels that the show is brightened with moral uplift-the murders are almost...
...this three more major characters (Joan Crawford, Brian Aherne, Martha Hyer), three other office romances, a script loaded with schoolgirl sophistication and half-aphorisms ("Old is when you know all the answers." "No, old is when you don't even bother to ask the question"), and an understandably bored performance by an old Hollywood pro, Director Jean Negulesco. The result is just about the dullest retelling of the old cautionary tale since Bertha, the Sewing-Machine Girl...
...audience can only watch a lost young man and a woman who gets older and older. At whatever age, Kim Stanley proves a gifted actress, but she seems about as Gallic as cornflakes and as demimondaine as Betsy Ross. She is forever fighting a role as well as a script...