The Alamo (1960)
🎵 Do you remember? The Texian army dismember 🎵
Howdy, y’all! Or should we say “¡Hola!” because we Texians have to stick together regardless of language. Today we gather in solemn, tequila-soaked remembrance of our most sacred of sites: Texas’ first football stadium The Alamo. Please respectfully enjoy this historically accurate passionate labor of love from John Wayne, who, though from Iowa, holds the idea of the Lone Star State dearly in his heart. Is that a good thing? Grab some queso and breakfast tacos and find out!
Previews
What, if anything, did we know about this coming attraction before we watched it?
Ellen: If you had asked me, “hey, is there a movie about the Alamo?” I would have said yes, and I might have even guessed that John Wayne is in it, but that’s all I’ve got!
Tyler: Same, it certainly feels right that this particular movie exists but I couldn’t have told you for sure that it actually did.
Plots & Feelings
This one’s pretty self-explanatory.
Short Version (courtesy of IMDb): In 1836, a small band of soldiers sacrifice their lives in hopeless combat against a massive army in order to prevent a tyrant from smashing the new Republic of Texas.
Long Version (modified from Wikipedia and formatted to fit your screen):
It’s 1836, and General Sam Houston has been given command of the Texas army, but there’s just one problem: there is no Texas army! He arrives in San Antonio to tell Lieutenant Colonel William Travis to hold off Mexican General Santa Anna’s forces as long as possible in order to buy Houston time to build up his men. The original plan is that they just need to hold long enough until Colonel Fannin comes with reinforcements, so Travis gets to work fortifying the old mission: The Alamo. Among the other defenders are Jim Bowie (whom I believe Travis would describe as “unserious,” given he was drunkenly passed out when Houston first arrived) and his volunteers, as well as new-arrival Davy Crockett and a band of Tennesseans.
Ellen: Even in the 1800s, the Alamo was already crumbling, woof.
Tyler: It’s a good reminder that there was a lot of history before Texas was even a thing: The Alamo dates back to the 1700s!
Tyler: Speaking of things I had to go to Wikipedia for, I don’t remember this part of US history well enough to know who some of these people actually are, what they’re fighting for and why, the importance of San Antonio/The Alamo in particular, etc. I kind of wish we had some sort of intro to give some historical context.
None of these people like each other: Jim Bowie is kind of a wild card, favoring a “cut, slash, run” strategy and resenting the disciplined and by-the-book methods of Travis, who chooses to withhold disheartening information from the men at large so that they don’t desert. Travis is also suspicious of the fact that Bowie has married into Mexican aristocracy. On the Crockett side of the house, he says his men think they’re there to drink and hunt, and they get a good start on that first one at the cantina on the eve of their arrival. Travis, in his pompous way, tries to have a very serious conversation with Crockett about convincing the Tennesseans to fight, but is interrupted by such things as shots and a gut-punching contest. Crockett can only maintain the everyman facade for so long, however, and he confides to Travis that he really believes in what Texas is doing to try and build a republic.
Tyler: … is Colonel Travis British?1 Did actors back then just not change their accent for a role?
There’s a B plot about Crockett and a hot, rich Mexican woman named Flaca and they develop one of those fake movie relationships where they care way too much too fast, but two important things come of it. First, she tips off the Texans to a cache of ammunition and weapons in an old church that they use for the Alamo’s defense. She also writes a letter to Crockett from Santa Anna demanding the Tennesseans’ surrender or departure. This group of men does not care for being told what to do, and even though Crockett immediately reveals the deception, they ultimately decide to stay.
Tyler: This poor woman exists in the script solely to make
John WayneDavy Crockett look like an upstanding and romantic guy. In an overlong movie that by this point was already failing the “Is this more interesting than my phone?” test, I feel like this could’ve been cut and replaced with shorter scenes or bits of dialogue about how they acquired the weapons.
As Santa Anna’s armies close in, Travis gets everyone in the town inside the fort and prepares for a siege. A rider with the flag of truce canters up to announce the terms of surrender, and Travis’s only response is to use his cigar to light a cannon at him in a move this author describes as “hot.” Crockett and Bowie are pleasantly surprised by his boldness, but any good vibes are short-lived.2 Travis still won’t give the green light for Bowie’s guerilla warfare plan, so he and Crockett take it into their own hands. They nonlethally subdue their own sentries and sneak out to the Mexican encampment to destroy their giant 12-foot cannon. The group gets away largely unscathed, thanks to Travis realizing what they were doing and providing cover as the saboteurs raced back into the Alamo’s walls.
Once safely inside, Travis and Bowie lose it on each other, both believing the other is in the wrong and agreeing to duel the second the war is over. Crockett tries to mediate, because he’s the only person anybody likes around here, and eventually he gets Bowie and his men drunk to stop them from leaving, which works! Crockett receives a punch in the face for his efforts, which seems like a fair trade to him.
Apparently sombreros make for decent Frisbees, because one is tossed over the wall for Bowie with horrible news: his wife died of the plague. Travis demands to see this unauthorized communication but immediately backs off and apologizes, which Bowie is too dejected to appreciate. Morale dips even lower upon the realization that most of their rations have been tainted by dysentery. Travis approves a raid on the Mexican forces’ supplies, so Bowie and Crockett steal their cattle while Captain Dickinson causes a distraction. They also steal a horse to send off the youngest of the Tennesseans, Smitty, to tell General Houston what’s going on.
Ellen: I know it’s the first time I mentioned him, but I’d die for Smitty.
Just as the Texans are preparing to do one of their favorite things (eat beef!), the Mexican forces prepare to make their first true attack. Santa Anna gives them time to evacuate all noncombatants, and while Dickinson’s wife and child refuse to leave, a man named Jocko is forced to stay by his wife, who gives a rousing (?) speech about it being an honor for him to die here rather than care for her and his four daughters, I guess.
Tyler: Jocko’s wife’s basically bullying him to stay and die was definitely … unexpected. I have to imagine her being blind was a deliberate choice by the filmmakers, but I don’t quite understand it.
The attack begins, and while the Alamo defenders manage to inflict heavy losses on the Mexicans, they lose a third of their own forces in the process. Bowie’s leg is injured, and they use a gun as a brace for some reason?? After Santa Anna’s men retreat for the day, the Texans receive devastating news3: Fannin was ambushed by the Mexican army and reinforcements aren’t coming. Travis gathers the men and tells them that they’ve done good work here by bloodying Santa Anna’s forces and buying General Houston 10 days, and they can leave without reproach, but Travis is staying. Inspired by his dedication, the rest of the men decide to stay.
Tyler: I'm no military strategist but this seems like a colossal waste after hearing that Fannin wasn’t coming. All just to buy the general, what, like an extra day?
Ellen: Tyler, you couldn’t possibly understand: these people like Texas.
Meanwhile, Smitty makes it to Houston (the general, not the non-existent-at-this-time city) and tells him of the siege. He hightails it right back to the Alamo without waiting for a reply. Houston, knowing that Fannin had been killed, is deeply regretful that no one can help them, and he hopes that Texas remembers.
Ellen: I’m shocked this movie had the restraint to not look straight at camera and say, “remember the Alamo.”
The Texan defenders spend a sleepless night pondering the nature of the afterlife, which they anticipate discovering all too soon. Bowie frees his slave Jethro as part of his wife’s final wishes, and Jethro chooses to stay and fight.4 Morning comes, and the Alamo is surrounded. Despite their best efforts, the walls are breached fairly quickly, and Travis, Crockett, and Bowie are all killed, though Crockett manages to blow up a bunch of people with him. As the last Texan is taken down, Mrs. Dickinson and her kids are discovered.
Ellen: I was happy for movie-Travis that he got in some solid sword-fighting before he was shot. That guy seemed like he was dying to use it.
After the battle is over, Santa Anna provides safe passage for Dickinson and her children, taking off his hat for them. They meet up with Smitty on the hill, who arrived just as things were ending. He also removes his hat in respect, and the group leaves San Antonio together.
Intermission
Even though ILTBTA is free, please indulge us further and enjoy this quick “advertisement.”
This installment of ILTBTA is brought to you by … The Alamo Gift Shop!
Look y’all, what’s the point of a statewide icon if you can’t make a little cheddar off it, am I right? So please, while you’re deep in your Alamo reverie, wander into the gift shop and treat yourself to the aforementioned Davy Crockett plush, some shockingly well-designed tees, or a giant Alamo gummy, which you will gnaw on very respectfully, we assume.
Mention ILTBTA with your purchase to get deeply confused looks at no additional charge!
Wiki-Wiki-Whaaat?
Love a good Wikipedia rabbit hole in search of some fun facts? Us too.
The Alamo’s Wikipedia page has some interesting facts and anecdotes that we recommend you read through, but here are a few of our favorites:
On the off chance you live under a rock and always skip directly to Wiki-Wiki-Whaaat?, The Alamo is (very very loosely; more on that below) based on the 1836 Battle of the Alamo between the Mexican Army and the Texian Army during the Texas Revolution. In a brief synopsis that’d make a history teacher wince, the Texas Revolution was fought by U.S. colonists (many of whom immigrated illegally into the region) and Hispanic Texans (“Tejanos”) against the Mexican government after several political and cultural clashes. One main source of tension was a disagreement over slavery: Mexico had abolished it in Texas in 1829, while many Texans wanted to keep it. After years of fighting, Texan General Sam Houston pushed Mexican forces back across the Rio Grande, and the Republic of Texas was eventually annexed as the 28th state of the U.S. in 1845.
Tyler: The irony of Texas essentially being co-founded by a bunch of illegal immigrants is almost too sweet. Almost.
Now that we’ve got some broader historical context, back to the titular battle. After initially pushing Mexican forces out of Mexican Texas, Alamo commander William Travis wrote several letters to the U.S. for more men and supplies, knowing that his 200-ish men could not withstand an attack by the roughly 1,500 approaching Mexican soldiers. Because it had a treaty with Mexico at the time, though, the U.S. government could not provide reinforcements, as doing so would have been an overt act of war.
As in the movie, those defending the Alamo prematurely partied because they thought Santa Anna’s forces were further away. After learning of the celebrations, Santa Anna ordered one of his generals to seize the largely unguarded Alamo, but was prevented from doing so by heavy rains.
Tyler: Had things gone differently, this could’ve been an episode of When Weather Changed History!
During the first week of the siege, some 200 cannonballs landed in the plaza of the Alamo, some of which were reused against the Mexican army when returning fire.
Ellen: Reduce, reuse, recycle.
Since many of the Mexican infantrymen were forcibly conscripted and not natural soldiers, they were at a slight disadvantage despite greatly outnumbering the Alamo defenders. For example, the Mexicans’ column formation not only provided easy target practice, but they also (somehow) often ended up accidentally shooting the men in front of them.
Susanna Dickinson, the wife of Alamo defender Almaron Dickinson, was one of the few survivors of the battle. She, along with her infant daughter and William Travis’ slave, Joe, were spared by Santa Anna and sent to the town of Gonzales to spread word of the battle and that Santa Anna’s army was unbeatable. Santa Anna spared Joe in order to help convince other Texan slaves to support the Mexican government and their rebuke of slavery.
Ellen: I’m glad that real-life Jethro said “that’ll be a strong ‘no thank you’ to dying from me.”
Tyler: Me too! I don’t understand why the movie thought any rational person would willingly die for the people who were (partially) fighting for the right to enslave them.
Okay, enough of the boring history stuff. Let’s get to the movie! In a factoid that will shock absolutely nobody, The Alamo has been criticized by historians for its lack of historical accuracy. Alamo historian Timothy Todish said that “there is not a single scene in The Alamo which corresponds to a historically verifiable incident,” which is about as cutthroat as historians get. Fellow historians James Frank Dobie and Lon Tinkle originally served as historical advisors for the movie, but demanded that their names be removed from the credits.
Despite being embarrassingly inaccurate (at least for the in-house historians), The Alamo seems to be exactly how director/producer/star John Wayne intended it. By the time it was released in 1960, Wayne had been working on it for fifteen years, investing $1.5 million of his own money to help it get filmed and exerting total control over the script and acting. His daughter later described it as “more than an obsession, it was the most intensely personal project in his career.”
A vehement anti-Communist, Wayne is thought to have incorporated many of his political beliefs into the speeches of characters in The Alamo. Many believe that Wayne’s intense patriotism stemmed from guilt over his failure to serve in the military during World War II, when studios threatened to sue him if he walked away from his contract and even intervened in the draft process to request deferments for him.
The Alamo was filmed in “Alamo Village,” a set built specifically for the film in Brackettville, Texas that was the first movie location built in Texas.
Teen pop idol Frankie Avalon was cast as (the fictional) Smitty after a similar stunt casting of singer Ricky Nelson in Rio Bravo the previous year proved successful. Avalon is best known for appearing in several beach party films in the 60s and singing “Beauty School Dropout” in Grease.
Ellen: If this were made today, they would have absolutely brought the pace to a crashing halt to shoehorn in Smitty singing about a bonfire or something.
Tyler: Oh like Ed Sheeran in Game of Thrones? I guess credit to Christopher Nolan for not doing so with Harry Styles in Dunkirk.
Laurence Harvey, who played Colonel Travis and was cast because Wayne admired British stage actors and wanted “British class,” broke his foot during filming when he forgot about a cannon’s recoil and it came down on his foot. Wayne later praises his professionalism because Harvey did not yell out in pain until after he yelled “Cut!”
After intense lobbying from Wayne, The Alamo was nominated for seven Academy Awards, more than movies now considered to be classics like Psycho (four) and Spartacus (six). Chill Wills, who played Beekeeper (one of Crockett’s Tennesseans) and was somehow nominated for Best Supporting Actor, waged a particularly tasteless PR campaign in which he took out an ad in The Hollywood Reporter saying “We of the Alamo cast are praying harder - than the real Texans prayed for their lives in the Alamo - for Chill Wills to win the Oscar.” Wayne was forced to publicly apologize on the film’s behalf, and Wills’ publicity agent ultimately took the blame.
Tyler: Kudos to that PR agent who jumped on that grenade because holy hannah what an outlandish thing to say. People nowadays get annoyed by the media blitzes that surround Oscar season, but I’d much rather have that (where you can actually, ya know, learn about the movie and the actor) then whatever this is.
Fill In The Blank
How did we really feel about The Academy nominating this?
Ellen: I’d like to sabotage The Academy’s cannon, but in a fun, slapstick kind of way. It’s tough to know exactly how much weight to give historical inaccuracy to a movie that is not pretending to be a history book, though The Alamo is arguably overly romanticized in modern retellings as well. I give this movie some points for overall scale, however. It’s telling a big, famous story with larger-than-life characters in an epic fashion, so I’ll admit to it pulling on my heartstrings a little. That said, it’s a case where the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts, because the only standout to me was the music. I didn’t particularly connect to any one element, least of all John Wayne’s acting, and my biggest takeaway will be a retroactive understanding of the street-naming in Houston. Sorry, fellas!
Tyler: I’d like to offer The Academy the option to leave The Alamo before the fighting gets bad, because I sure am. As I’ve previously written, I clearly was not born in the right generation to understand the appeal of John Wayne as an actor: he’s literally monotonous and has, like, negative charisma. So an ahistorical movie he directed as a vehicle to shoehorn his political beliefs into that’s flat, too long, and just so happens to make his character the most macho, righteous, and three-dimensional (low bar) was never going to be a hit for me. As I mentioned in Plots & Feelings, for a movie that arguably should’ve been building tension towards the climactic siege, it didn’t do well in the all-important “Is this more entertaining than my phone?” test. We get a taste of it with the final battle, an “Oh shit” moment where we finally see our protagonist’s forces vastly outnumbered, but not enough for my liking. Historical movies where the audience knows the ending going into it can be tricky, but great movies (e.g.,the previously-mentioned Dunkirk, Titanic, and Apollo 13) find a way to keep you entertained regardless. The Alamo is not a great movie.
Let The Credits Roll
Thanks for reading! Some quick housekeeping as you exit the theatre:
If you have plots and feelings of your own (on the movie or ILTBTA in general), feel free to comment on the post or simply reply to the email. If you liked reading this: tell your friends! If you hated reading this: tell your friends how much you hated it by forwarding it to them!
If you’re a weirdo like Tyler and use the social media site formerly known as Twitter, feel free to follow us there @BlankTheAcademy for ILTBTA updates, rejected jokes, and other random movie-related musings. Once we reach a million followers, we’ll offer to purchase the @ILTBTA handle from the butthead who snagged it before us.
ILTBTA is also on Letterboxd, the social networking site for movie fans. Follow us there to read our Spreadsheet comments of our ILTBTA movies, plus our ratings of other movies we watch!
If you’d like to start a wild Best Picture journey of your own, feel free to download a copy of The Spreadsheet. Bonus: checking off the boxes is oddly satisfying.
Post-Credits Scene
Get a sneak peek at the next ILTBTA installment.
Alright enough time in the South, let’s venture north shall we? Our next post will cover the 1942 biographical musical Yankee Doodle Dandy. Starring James Cagney, Yankee Doodle Dandy follows the life of Broadway legend George M. Cohan, who was known in the 1910s as “the man who owned Broadway.” It is available to rent from Amazon Prime Video, TVs of the Apple and Google variety, and something called Fandango at Home that I’m learning about as I type this.
Until then, Remember The Alamo (is an okay-at-best movie that isn’t super historically accurate but has a couple things going for it)!
Future Tyler: This got cut for space from Wiki-Wiki-Whaaat? (hard to believe, I know), but apparently during tense moments in production, the actor who played Travis would perform Shakespeare in a Texas accent. So he was clearly capable of adopting an accent, it was just a deliberate choice not to.
Sounds like my ex-wife!
Sounds like every football season, amirite?
Y tho?
Highly recommend reading "Forget the Alamo," which explores the myth-making and propaganda created from what was a pretty lame and pointless battle. John Wayne's Alamo fetish was only bested by Phil Collins, who probably spent half his fortune on fake Alamo relics.