Truly Dreadful Film

The greatest movie ever!

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Overwrought, overly-macho take on a very historic event. Should have been simple enough: tell the story of the Battle of the Alamo with some good, epic action scenes and some character development. The action scenes are there, and are good. However, the character development is quite superficial: there are no shades of grey. Travis is a martinet, Crockett and Bowie are one-dimensional, anarchic, uber- hero adventurers. Moreover, director John Wayne and writer James Edward Grant add in several sub-plots which have no bearing on the story. Yes, some are there to add some colour to the characters, but they just seem gratuitous and wholly unnecessary. Acting is almost all of the over-the-top macho variety. John Wayne was always going to be the swaggering hero (that's all he knows), and, as he is director, now he has licence to crank up the swagger. Richard Widmark comes close to matching him in this regard. Only Laurence Harvey, as Travis, plays it straight. Too straight: he comes off as cranky.Surprisingly, despite all the hammy acting that abounds, this movie got an acting Oscar nomination. Chill Wills was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, for his performance as Beekeeper. Probably the most undeserved Oscar nomination in history. Apparently his marketing campaign in attempting to get the Oscar is worth a movie itself...This all said, this version is still far better than the one from 2004.

It is impossible for John Wayne to make a bad film. This is probably because he loves America so much and all of his films reflect this feeling. No one wants to see liberal crapola about hating America like Michael Moore makes. That being said, this is probably John Wayne's second most patriotic movie, the first being of course, "The Green Berets". This film is a faithful retelling of the siege of the Alamo, where 170 brave Americans held off an invading force of 3000 for 13 days to allow Sam Houston to regroup. I am sure everyone is aware of the narrative of the siege of the Alamo, but it has never been better told than here by John Wayne. God Bless John Wayne, may he rest is peace. There will never be another movie star that shines so brightly.

This review is for the shortened, two-hour, forty-one minute version.John Wayne threw everything he had into making this film, at the apex of his stardom, and just for that, and the sacrifice it honors, I want to celebrate it. I just can't."The Alamo" presents the story of the heroic last stand of some 180 Texas irregulars against the massed might of Santa Anna's Mexican army, featuring Wayne both as director and actor (playing Davy Crockett, one of the defenders at the siege.) It's full of great images, solid performances, and affecting scenes. Also, it's terribly long (even the edited version I saw runs over two-and-a-half hours) and weakened by a tendency toward preachiness and lazy sentiment.Is it entertaining? I say yes, albeit intermittently, even though it doesn't adhere to the facts and feels rather underbaked in the story department. Print the legend, as Wayne's patron John Ford was often quoted as saying, however spuriously, and "The Alamo" sort of does that, pushing the story as an exercise in rah-rah sentiment which strangely veers into liberal platitudes about republicanism and respecting one's foe even as he's bent on killing you to the last man.Reading the reviews here, you get the sense more than you do with IMDb takes on other Wayne movie how much he attracts negativity from people who see him as an avatar of American imperialism. Yet "The Alamo" is the last film of Wayne's which deserves such opprobrium. The film soft-soaps the viciousness of Santa Anna, whose no-quarter approach to riot control did him in as an effective ruler, and sets up the title edifice as a kind of coming together of multi-ethnic harmony. Even given the context of legend-building, this plays way too good to be true.The script, by Wayne's favorite writer James Edward Grant, pushes buttons without mercy or subtlety. This is the film where Denver Pyle, as one of the Alamo's defenders, marvels about the Mexicans bent on the slaughter of him and his comrades: "Even when I was killin' 'em, I was proud of 'em."Wayne took a lousy part, a character already brilliantly defined on TV by Fess Parker, and did what he could with it. As director, he selflessly ceded the stage to his co-stars, especially Richard Widmark as a tough, no-nonsense Jim Bowie and Laurence Harvey as Col. William Travis, the most interesting character in the picture. Harvey, burdened somewhat by an on-and-off English accent, gives Travis a veneer that makes him likable, even as he plays loose with the facts in keeping his men in the fort. Harvey at least is clearly enjoying himself, and for that his scenes have real color and vim.Some reviewers here say the film is cheated when cut a half-hour from the version first released in roadshow form. Certainly what I see here felt compromised by the absence of a resolution to a story arc involving a bad-guy American named Emil Sand and the woman he seeks to pressure into marriage. But it wasn't like I wanted this movie longer.The finale at least is terrific. Call it "Wild Bunch 1.0" for the way Wayne shoots the battle itself, all quick cuts and grisly deaths with hardly a dollop of sentiment. It's visceral filmmaking, and shows Wayne could shoot action, however lacking Widmark and others found his direction in terms of character development.Ultimately, "The Alamo" works okay as cinematic entertainment, aided greatly by William H. Clothier's cinematography which gives every shot that epic feeling that came so naturally in the 1960s and rarely thereafter. It's not entirely empty otherwise, Wayne's affable performance is on par with his later work and Grant manages to write some good dialogue here and there, like when Bowie learns the fate of his wife. But for such a legendary moment in American history, one is left wanting for much more.

Beneath the on-screen machismo and bravado, John Wayne was by all accounts a down-to-earth guy, and this almost always comes through in his performances. It comes through in "The Alamo" not only in his typically John Waynian portrayal of Davy Crockett but in his simple, unchallenging directorial style. John Ford, had he been at the helm, may have opted for a few more sweeping landscape shots or evocative silhouettes to give the visuals more flavor. Still, I doubt even Ford could have turned this bland script into a really high-quality film. "The Alamo" is a likable enough movie, with surprisingly even-handed treatment of the Mexican army, but nothing about it rises above average except perhaps Laurence Harvey's performance as the upper-crust Colonel Travis.