So Bad It’s Good Blogathon – They Came to Cordura (1959)

Image from Trailers from Hell

The Sixth So Bad It’s Good Blogathon is here! My friend Rebecca over at Taking Up Room is once again hosting this marvellous blogathon where we all essentially gush over or bash films we consider to be bad… so bad they’re… good is a stretch, but let’s say, alright-ish. Check out all the entries here!

My entry is a Western that I’ve always thoguht was one of the weakest ones. I re-watched it again recently for this article and I still stand by it. I’m talking about They Came to Cordura (1959).

In They Came to Cordura (1959, dir, Robert Rossen), Major Thomas Thorn (Gary Cooper) is tasked with recommending soldiers for the Congressional Medal of Honor during the Mexican Border Incursion of 1916. He rounds up a group of men and they make their way to Cordura. Along the way, they meet Adelaide Geary (Rita Hayworth), the owner of a border town who’s accused of helping Mexico against the United States.

Written by Rossen and Ivan Moffat and based on the novel by Glendon Swarthout, They Came To Cordura features a dream supporting cast including Tab Hunter, Dick York, Van Heflin and Richard Conte, and right off the bat, it looks like it has all the right elements to make it good. On paper. On film, They Came to Cordura fails on so many levels. It sounds like a Western, it feels like a Western, but it essentially tries too hard to actually be a Western, with stuff that we’ve seen time and again, and not a whole lot of inventive or innovative moments or ideas. It is pretty much a run-of-the-mill Western where everything just looks slightly… fake.

The action scenes are overdone and come in way too early, the direction is patchy and the cinematography looks weird, with a blue-ish tone to it that doesn’t look quite right. And with a cast like that (Richard Conte in a Western? Yes please!), you’d think the performances would really stand out, but apart from Tab Hunter, no performance in the movie is really that believable and the always lovely Rita Hayworth is downright miscast.

I always thought They Came to Cordura didn’t know what it wanted to be, and just decided to take notes from other Westerns and run with it. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it has its moments. The scenes between Hayworth and Cooper are really sweet, and the ending is especially lovely and it does convey a sort of message that seems to be the theme of the film. But overall, it is one of the weaker Westerns, though it’s to be expected, given the sheer amount of Westerns that were produced during that period. They can’t all be The Searchers (1956).

But on the other hand, I sort of named my Western screenplay after it, so… yay!