John Wayne’s “The Alamo”

It’s OK. But a lot of movies end that way. After all, MGM is a big company and the roaring lion is its trademark.

 

I'm glad I went to the set, "Alamo City," near Bracketville, in 2004. It was used for many other movies, but the town, the church, the cantina, the compound ... were all still there. It is hidden from the entrance, and I had to drive up a grass trail with cattle around. But it was worth it to stand on the ramparts and look at the 'town' and see the hills in the background just as they appeared in the movie.
Now it's been closed to the public for years and many things were auctioned 3 years ago-- wagons and carriages, posters and other items from the gift shop. So far no efforts to 'save' the place are successful, and it's rotting away.

 

Trivia:
I decided to check out the link and was surprised to find Wayne directed the movie himself. Apparently he was a director of a few of his films, but evidently this is the only one he directed solo.

 

I'm sure I've forgotten some of the details I used to know, but this was actually a quest of 14 years by J.W. to produce a movie about the Alamo. He continually couldn't make arrangements via Republic Studios, and when he cut ties with them, they ironically soon made such a movie without him. But the project finally began when he got enough financing to start building the set, and it was 2 years start of this to the finished product. He only wanted to produce and direct; but there was too much pressure from distributors that he must be IN the movie. As for the inaccuracies and "Davy Crockett's" speeches about freedom and resistance, Wayne admitted all along that it was his allegory of the Cold War, and thus, in such a big movie that was "his baby," that's how he wanted it ironed out, and he got it

 

I dispute at least one of those. It says "The movie never acknowledged the Bowie Knife." When Crockett meets Bowie, who helps him when he's being beaten up by Emil's men, Crockett says, "You must be Jim Bowie-- size and shape is as described, and this knife sure looks like all I heard it was." Then later, after Crockett throws that knife into Emil's chest and kills him, he says, "Better watch this knife, Jim; first one I ever wanted to steal in my life." That seems to be acknowledging to me.

 

his best movie was though the Searchers!

 

Have never seen the movie but I have fond memories of Disney's series on Davy Crockett back in the late '50s. We got some of those, including "Indian Fighter" (episode 1) about 25 years ago on cassette tape, now useless as I'm too cheap to have it put on a modern medium. For the 1950s, that first episode was remarkably benevolent to the indigenous peoples, and having read that the main reason Crockett wasn't re-elected to Congress was his being out of step with his peers' harsh treatment of the Appalachian tribes, the Disney version seems defensible.