The Alamo

Over the long history of the Oscars there have been a lot of films that induce head-scratching over their inclusion in the Best Picture category. Certainly The Alamo is a film that no one, even back then, would consider a "best" film of any year. But it's nomination isn't really surprising, if you understand the politics and sentiment of the Academy membership, particularly in 1960. The Alamo got nominated not because it was good film--it is not--but because of John Wayne.

Wayne had long wanted to make a film about the doomed stand that a small band of Texans made against a much larger Mexican force in the San Antonio mission back in 1836. He saw it as representative of American courage and heroism, and right away we get the idea, when we are told the Mexican general and ruler, Santa Anna, is "tyrannical," and that Texans were fighting for "freedom." There is truth in that; in particular, the Mexican insistence that Texans convert to Catholicism was onerous, but at no time in this film is there any mention of the Texan wish to repeal the Mexican ban on slavery. The curious American obsession with freedom while simultaneously holding people in involuntary servitude is the great conundrum of our history, but unreflected upon here.

No studio wanted to do it unless someone like John Ford directed it, but Wayne directed it himself. (A documentary on the DVD includes a humorous anecdote about Ford, who showed up uninvited, and sat next to the camera as if he were directing. Wayne didn't want to disrespect him, so gave him some second-unit stuff to shoot). Wayne would also star, as the mythic Davy Crockett, with Richard Widmark as Jim Bowie and Laurence Harvey as William Travis.

The film is, to put it mildly, historically inaccurate. Almost nothing about it is true, other than these people were in that spot at that time. We're in for a bad time when Richard Boone, as Sam Houston, has dialogue in the opening scene that puts the Alamo on the Rio Grande, when it is a few hundred miles away from that particular stream. I could go on and on about what is not true, but what is most stunning is that which is possibly true is not included: Travis drawing a line in the sand, and asking for volunteers to stay when their fate is sealed. Screenwriter James Edward Grant didn't believe this was true, so left it out, so we miss the dramatic scene of Bowie's bed being carried across the line (he was ill with typhoid throughout the siege, something else left out of Wayne's version). It seems laughable that Grant became a stickler in this scene when everything else he wrote is fantasy.

The DVD I saw is 162 minutes, which, believe it or not, is the short version. The original version was a half-hour longer, and I'm merciful not to have to seen it. The actual assault on the mission doesn't occur until about a half-hour is left, which means the other two-plus hours is wheel spinning. The first third is Wayne imprinting his persona onto Crockett's, so that the King of the Wild Frontier is just another Wayne cowboy. There's a section involving a Mexican widow and her cretinous suitor, which is dropped, and some comic relief involving Crockett's Tennessee men, notably Chill Wills. One of my favorite Oscar stories involves Wills, who was the voice of Francis, the Talking Mule. He somehow ended up with a Best Supporting Actor nomination, and his publicist went overboard in campaigning for the award, putting out an ad that suggested that the Alamo cast were praying harder for a Wills win than the actual soldiers at the Alamo prayed for their lives. The ad ended with "Win, lose or draw, you're all my cousins and I love you all." Groucho Marx responded with an ad of his own: "Dear Mr. Chill Wills: I am delighted to be your cousin, but I voted for Sal Mineo."

Wayne, who could be a good actor, mostly relied lazily on his old habits, as he does here as Crockett. Harvey, an Englishman, played Travis as a martinet, constantly at odds with Bowie (there is no mention of Bowie's career as a land swindler). In the supplemental material, Ken Curtis, who played Captain Dickinson, said that Wayne was a good director of action sequences, but not of actors, because his suggestions were all geared to having actors ape Wayne's mannerisms.

The Alamo is a tale of courage, but of misplaced courage. It certainly doesn't represent the jingoism Wayne meant to express. But beyond that, the film is colossally dull, overly sentimental, and written with too much italics and too many exclamation points (a speech by Crockett on how much he likes the word "republic" really rankles). That it beat out Psycho in this category is galling, but par for the Oscar course.