Cinema: New Picture, Nov. 7, 1960

• Share

The Alamo (Batjac; United Artists), which is the first picture ever directed by Hollywood He-Man John Wayne, is also the biggest western ever made. Wayne & Co. have not quite managed to make it the worst. Shot in Todd-AO and exposed on color film that is practically fluorescent, the movie was produced on location in a $1,500,000 replica of the Alamo and the village around it, employs 1,500 horses and seven instantly recognizable human beings (Wayne, Richard Widmark, Laurence Harvey, Richard Boone, Frankie Avalon, Linda Cristal, Chill Wills). Released as a reserved-seat feature ($1.50-$3.50), it is said to have cost $12 million. Predicts one shrewd old Hollywood range rider, Director John (Stagecoach) Ford: "It will run forever.''

In the case of The Alamo, forever is almost attained in one projection; the film runs three hours and 38 minutes, including an intermission. The first three hours, moreover, are as flat as Texas. Plenty happens: a seduction, an orgy, a murder, a battle royal in a barroom. But it all seems to have happened before, in some other John Wayne western, and in any case most of the action has nothing to do with the Alamo.

When the film finally does get down to historical cases, it proves to be shamelessly inaccurate. Two leading characters. Colonel William B. Travis (Laurence Harvey) and Jim Bowie (Richard Widmark), are respectively nastified and sissified almost out of recognition for theatrical effect. The Mexican army, apparently in deference to the large Mexican movie market, is presented as a body of sensitive young men who look as though they all have college degrees and suffer every time they pull a trigger. And at one point, just in case the teen-agers don't dig all that ancient history. Singer Avalon jumps up and belts out a little rock 'n' roll.

Worse yet is the phony backwoodsiness of much of the dialogue ("Yuh doan git lard less'n yuh boil the hawg"), and worst of all is the teary sentiment that blears every other frame of the film and wallows to a climax of blubbering bathos when a little girl, as the carnage at the Alamo concludes, turns to her mother and piteously inquires: "Mummy, where's Daddy?"

In so much movie there are bound to be a couple of good things. The gorgeously gory fracas at the finish is one of them, and John Wayne is the other. Nature clearly did not intend this man to be a director. But as Davy Crockett he demonstrates once again his superiority over the rest of Hollywood's strong, silent types in portraying the unaccommodated man—the natural ignobleman invested with the authority of size and the dignity of slow wits.