As an actor, John Wayne was rarely interested in humans; he was interested in heroes. Wayne was a movie star in the classic sense, because you generally went to a John Wayne movie to see “The Duke,” not the character he was playing. It only made sense for the story of The Alamo – where a handful of Texas patriots briefly fended off the entire Mexican army in 1836 on the road to Texas independence – to become an obsession for Wayne. Here was a story much more about a legend of heroic men than about the emotional lives of those men.
Wayne’s directing debut, The Alamo is the kind of film you’d expect from a star accustomed to stories of large men told on a large scale. While the narrative includes a dose of internal conflict – primarily between the Alamo’s straight-arrow Texas Army commander Colonel Travis ( Laurence Harvey) and hard-drinking, hard-fighting Jim Bowie ( Richard Widmark) – it’s essentially an old-fashioned dose of hero worship. The Alamo re-affirms the quintessentially American conviction that, as was the case during the American Revolution, underdogs on the right side of a fight will ultimately persevere. And we’re assured that the mostly volunteer fighters are simple folk (we Americans don’t like our heroes to think they’re too high-falutin’) who possess unique reserves of courage, loyalty and dedication to principle.
That goes double for Davy Crockett (played by Wayne), the former Tennessee congressman around whom legend grew as thick as the fur on his coonskin cap. We see the chivalrous Davy (protecting a Mexican widow from an opportunistic carpetbagger), the affectionate Davy (wistfully wishing kids never had to grow up), the patriotic Davy (waxing eloquent on the power of the word “republic”) and the rough-and-tumble man of the people Davy (engaging one of his men in a good-natured punching contest). Ambiguity or psychic turmoil be dashed – this is a capital ‘H’ Hero.
Wayne is so resolute as a filmmaker about lionizing Crockett and the rest of the Alamo troops that it’s startling when The Alamo pauses to reflect on complexities of warfare. After an unsuccessful initial charge by the Mexican army, Alamo soldiers pause to acknowledge the nobility of men willing to die for what they believe is right, even if they’re the men on the opposite side of the battle lines. It’s an effective step into a grey area, even if it’s a brief and isolated one.
Ultimately, it’s hard to get past the sense that The Alamo is more a monument than a movie. Granted, it’s a spectacularly staged monument, with a cast of thousands, authentic fully functional sets and impressive battle sequences. I suppose there’s a certain value to watching re-enactments of valour, even if they’re part of a narrative composed primarily of speeches occasionally interrupted by broad attempts at comic relief. “There’s right and there’s wrong,” Davy Crockett says at one point in The Alamo – and that, in a nutshell, is the world of a John Wayne movie.
