The New Pictures

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 motivation for the usual violent action, which in this film is intensified and refined into a genuine parable of the journey of the soul, a sort of Pilgrim's Progress through the Mexican badlands.

The 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 is, and who has it.

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 them, for personal reasons as well as for Army records, what made them do the heroic things they did.

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 him.

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 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.

Libel (Anatole de Grunwald; M-G-M), the film treatment of a 1935 courtroom melodrama, is a rubbery old turkey stuffed with chestnuts. Among the chestnuts: the amnesia bit and the double dodge. The fellow who has lost his memory is a British baronet (Dirk Bogarde), who lives in a stately home and wonders pathetically why he can remember hardly anything of his life before the night, during World War II, when he escaped from a German prison camp with a man (Dirk Bogarde) who looked almost exactly like him. All at once the third member of the escape (Paul Massie) appears and asserts, in a letter to the editor of a scandal sheet, that the baronet is not really the baronet at all, but the other man, who has murdered the baronet, taken his title, and is now enjoying his perquisites (Olivia de Havilland). The nobleman naturally sues the cad for libel, and the trial runs the predictable course of flash back and backchat. Still and all, the suspense is fairly well contrived, and the dull spots are shrewdly interrupted by the bawling of the barristers, a couple of silly old horrors played by Robert Morley and Wilfrid Hyde White with admirable harrumphasis.

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