The Alamo

John Wayne produces, directs and plays Davy Crockett, and The Alamo is his 202-minute case for why a few hundred men should stay inside a mission they know they cannot hold. James Edward Grant’s screenplay treats the siege as a debate: about Texas, about liberty, about what a man owes the people who follow him. It is entirely sincere. It is also, for long stretches, a film in which people stand in a courtyard and tell each other what they believe, and the belief is always the same.

The verdict, plainly: the last forty minutes are worth seeing and the two and a half hours before them are a test. Most critics failed it in 1960 for the talk and the flag-waving, and they were not wrong about either. We are a little kinder, because when Wayne finally stops his cast speaking and starts them moving he shows he had an eye for size.

That eye belongs partly to William H. Clothier. He shoots the plaza wide and low, so that the mission’s broken walls sit against the sky like a row of teeth, and he holds the frame long enough for a rider to cross it at full gallop. When Santa Anna’s army arrives, columns in white and blue filing over the ridge and into the town while the garrison watches from the wall, we sat forward and stopped noticing the runtime. It is one wide shot after another, no cutting to faces, and it makes the odds visible in a way no speech manages. Ann Peck and Frank Beetson Jr. dress the two sides so you can read them at a distance: buckskin and homespun on the parapet, pressed uniforms below.

Dimitri Tiomkin’s score does most of the film’s feeling for it. The ballad the men sing on the night before the assault, “The Green Leaves of Summer”, is the one place the sentiment arrives quietly, and it moved us more than any of Crockett’s monologues. The rest of the time Tiomkin is asked to bring the brass in under a speech, and he obliges.

The cast is uneven in a revealing way. Laurence Harvey plays Travis as a stiff, vain, correct man who is right about nearly everything and unbearable about all of it, and he is the best thing in the film. Richard Widmark gives Bowie a drinker’s temper and is left with little to do once the arguing stops. Wayne plays Crockett as Wayne, large and easy and amused, which is pleasant for an hour. Then Grant hands him a speech about the word “republic” and how he likes the sound of it, then another, and we began to feel lectured by a man who had also hired the hall. Linda Cristal’s Flaca exists so that Crockett has someone to explain his principles to. Joseph Calleia’s Juan Seguin and Carlos Arruza’s Lieutenant Reyes are the few Mexican characters given any dignity, and they get a scene or two each.

Stuart Gilmore’s editing is where the trouble lives. Scenes do not end when their point is made; they end when the last man has finished talking. A cantina brawl, a courtship, a row about command, each runs a beat or three too long, and across 202 minutes those beats add up to about an hour we did not need. We were bored, honestly bored, through the middle stretch, and then irritated at being bored by a story we knew would end in the most dramatic way possible.

Wayne had spent two decades being directed by John Ford and you can see what he took: the wide horizon, the men in the doorway, the song by the fire. What he did not take was Ford’s impatience with his own sentiment. Ford would have cut Crockett off mid-sentence. Wayne lets him finish.

See it for the arrival of the army and for the assault, which Wayne stages with hundreds of extras and no cheating, and which we will not describe; every ticket-buyer in 1960 knew how it went anyway. Give the last hour your full attention and let the first two wash past with a cup of tea. That is not quite a recommendation. It is what we would do.