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| Images courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer |
The story of American ‘King of the Wild Frontier’ Davy
Crockett, the Texas Revolution and the subsequent Battle of the Alamo has been
in pop cultural media something of a folk heroic mass phenomenon. Though everyone knows the story of the
Tennessee based politician and soldier who ultimately met his end at the 1836
Battle of the Alamo, the saga and aura surrounding the character of Davy
Crockett rather than the real person in historical context took on a life of
its own after numerous silent and sound screen adaptations and particularly
when the Walt Disney company got involved.
Popularized by the television series Davy Crockett aired between
1954 and 1955 as part of Walt Disney’s Disneyland program, the show
starred Fess Parker donned in a coonskin cap which ushered in the song The
Ballad of Davy Crockett into the ears of budding new young fans eager to
get a piece of the bona fide American action.
Enter longtime western movie screen icon John Wayne, a
mainstay of the American New Wave who like the subject of Davy Crockett himself
began in silent cinema, working his way up through westerns and war movies
alike to eventually become one of the AFI’s top male stars of the classic
American cinema period. Most well known
for films like Red River, The Searchers, True Grit, Rio
Bravo and The Quiet Man, Wayne nicknamed The Duke was one of Old
Hollywood’s most powerful box office draws at the time. Little did viewers know that for years, going
all the way back to 1945, Wayne developed a keen interest in making a film
dramatizing the Battle of the Alamo too.
After a failed first try that resulted in the development of
another film called The Last Command, the project eventually titled The
Alamo became for better or worse the most intensely personal project of the
actor’s career. Co-financed by Robert
Fellows with their own production company Batjac in conjunction with United
Artists and penned by The Comancheros screenwriter James Edward Grant,
Wayne sought for full creative control over the project with emphasis on
thwarting potential studio meddling by the decision to produce and direct the
film himself.
Largely centered around a major movie set dubbed Alamo
Village that took two years to build in Brackettville, Texas which also
included adobe bricks formed by hand to authentically reconstruct the walls of
the Alamo Mission and was later reused in numerous western films and television
shows, The Alamo while a historical epic featuring John Wayne in the
leading role of Davy Crockett opposite Richard Widmark and Laurence Harvey
served as something of a platform for Wayne’s politics at the time. At the behest of investors Wayne cast himself
in the titular role of Davy Crockett while Sam Houston was played by Richard
Boone and Richard Widmark as Jim Bowie and Laurence Harvey as William Barrett
Travis respectively.
A common misconception on the project is that John Wayne was
inexperienced with commanding performances out of actors and further mistakenly
suggested John Ford did scenes of the film uncredited. Filming was reportedly grueling with frequent
rattlesnakes and crickets, the untimely death of one of its smaller character
actors and grandiose battle sequences staged on the Alamo Village set with a
three-hour-plus rough cut in the can. Shot
with sweeping 65mm Todd-AO grandeur by The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance cinematographer
William H. Clothier and given an epic orchestral score by Dimitri Tiomkin
rendered in 6-track surround sound, the look, sound and feel of The Alamo from
a purely technical end is top notch film production.
Cast and performance wise, everyone across the board in the
ensemble wartime piece from John Wayne as the crusty Davy Crockett giving an
uncharacteristically understated performance to Richard Widmark and Laurence
Harvey in supporting roles as Colonels Jim Bowie and William Barret Travis give
pitch perfect screentime to the epic film.
Frankie Avalon fans will spot the singer as Smitty the youngest Alamo
defender and John Wayne’s son Patrick also costars as Captain James Butler
Bonham. Most of the rest of the cast is
relegated to the hundreds of extras comprising the film’s explosive battle
sequences filmed elegantly from the viewpoint of the Alamo Village rooftop.
Technically the first official directorial effort by the
western action movie screen icon and an attempt at tackling an important chapter
in American history in epic widescreen Hollywood form with mostly independent
financing, The Alamo originally premiered at a 70mm roadshow exceeding
the three-hour mark replete with an overture and intermission before the studio
cut it further down to a more user friendly two-hours-and-thirty-seven-minutes. While the film was a sizable commercial
success theatrically and garnered seven Academy Award nominations (ultimately
winning for Best Sound), the film was a financial loss for John Wayne who
relinquished final cut after selling it to United Artists in the end.
While the film was of course attacked for historical
inaccuracies with further emphasis on the actor’s point of view rather than
full adherence to the facts, The Alamo though imperfect and more than a
little overblown is still a striking 70mm epic.
Tragically the original 70mm roadshow version though transferred to
laserdisc with 5.1 Dolby Digital sound was lost to time though valiant efforts
to resurrect the film in high definition remain steadfast. Curiously, a small portion of the film went
into the MGM Cinerama film How the West was Won also starring Wayne at
one point, another equally curious if not deeply flawed yet beautiful attempt
to bring battles of the old American west onto the glorious celluloid sonically
immersive silver screen.
Using state-of-the-art technology and quite the ensemble
cast of characters populating, The Alamo was probably the most powerful
large screen historical wartime epic next to Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus released
that same year. Though decades later in
2004 another newer The Alamo film (unseen by me) was made with Billy Bob
Thornton as Davy Crockett from director John Lee Hancock, that picture tanked
critically and especially commercially and for good or for ill never fully married
notions of Old Hollywood with the then-New independent Hollywood in the ways which
Wayne’s most cherished labor of love did.
Maybe among the biggest, most expensive independently co-financed historical
epic films featuring raw star power in front of and behind the camera to emerge
from the beginning of the 1960s.
--Andrew Kotwicki
