Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Alamo!

Article theme: The Yellow Rose of Texas/The Eyes of Texas  - Elvis Presley

Because by any other metric it's great, the risible angle John Wayne h8ers have to take toward his epic masterpiece is that it is historically inaccurate on several counts, which puts it in the company of every single movie ever based on an historical event.

Everyone knows the real Crockett waterskied everywhere on two alligators.

I mean, did the Iliad faithfully capture the factual details of every moment of the Trojan war? There is a case to be made that movies should have to disclose their deviations from true events, but if you think this is anywhere near the worst offender, or that its purview is actually history and not myth, you need to put down the crack pipe. The facts are simply that 200-odd men stood against 7000, knowing defeat was inevitable, to buy time for General Sam Houston's army to escape north and lick itself into shape to claim the territory from the grasp of Antonio López de Santa Anna.

Who would win? I mean, yeah, actually it's the second lot, but it's the thought that counts.

"MaKe TeXaS mExIcO aGaIn" squealers can cope and seethe; if anything, Wayne's romantic narrative is too kind to Santa Anna, who didn't even bother to dispute the charge of despotism laid at his foot, went around calling himself the Mexican Napoleon, and was so narcissistic-slash-bug-fuck-insane he once held a funeral with full military honours for his amputated leg. Despite being an absolute cartoon, Santa Anna was reinstated three times by various disgruntled factions in old Méjico in between periods of exile for fucking everything up, only to fuck everything up again. His legacy is losing Texas because he was as incompetent as he was megalomaniacal. Yet Wayne - himself a boogeyman for his pinko detractors - was uninterested in the farcical demonology that would inevitably result from a proper treatment of the not-so-great dictator, showing more warmth and empathy for the enemy troops than any lib has ever mustered for someone who so much as called him a fag on 4Chan:

Much of the drama at the film's core is derived from clashing personalities under the pressure of imminent death. Richard Widmark plays Jim Bowie rough and ornery, Laurence Harvey plays Will Travis with a huge stick up his ass, and the Duke himself plays Davy Crockett straight down the middle, a canny diplomat who speaks the language of the rough-and-ready volunteers and the distinguished men of state with equal fluency. Charges of caricature could be levied by fanboys of any colonel of the three, but as a dramatic dynamic it keeps what might be a dull wait sparking with uncertainty, internal conflict and odd-couple humour. There's even a subplot in which Wayne trolls some glory-supporting merchant trying to pressure a young Latina hottie (Linda Cristal) into marriage, before packing her off to safety in old-timey chivalric fashion.

The character is listed in the credits as "Sausage Fest Disruptor", which I personally felt was just a little on-the-nose.

The fact you know from the jump everyone dies at the end (spoilars!!1) makes it all the more vital to pack the early scenes with endearing nonsense of this genre. You'll feel cheated of a whole series of Wayne-as-Crockett adventures, to the point of forgetting Wayne played Wayne in everything he ever made, which is quite the achievement for his 5,475th film. Moreover, he surrounds himself with such a strong cast of oddball minor characters that no scene passes without robust populist humour and pathos. Wayne sank $1,500,000 of his own money into the project, and his palpable love of the heroes outshines any question of intended disrespect. The Alamo is the siege classic to which misguided Zulu fans might best be gently redirected.

Roll call at an average Texas school (2025, colourised).

Contrary to what decades of character assassination might have you believe, the ideals for which the Duke actually stood were downright naïve in their let's-all-get-along would-be moderate-centrism.

In real life republics as a system are best characterised as utterly immunocompromised against destabilisation by l*ft-wing psychopaths, at which point the best-case scenario is that a Franco steps in to salvage the nation at the cost of many lives, and in the very worst cases you get a Mao. I have no faith in Wayne's dream, but perhaps, like Plato's own Republic, it's something that can only be truly realised beyond the confines of this world. For Wayne, that dream was one worth sharing. In his utter, naked earnestness, he gave a fitting tribute to the men who died for that impossible dream.