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Chapter 10 Mission Statement: The Alamo and the Fallacy of Historical Accuracy in Epic Filmmaking Don Graham The Alamo is the oldest Texas story that keeps getting retold for mass audiences in that form of national memory known as the movies. Yet despite repeated versions from the earliest days of filmmaking into the twenty-first century, no Alamo film has ever captured the national imagination to the extent that other ventures in historical epic movie-making have. Hollywood historical epics appeal to their audience not only because they entertain but also because they resonate with the collective memory of that audience, Gone with the Wind and Red River being cases in point. Each sold a version of America that Americans wanted to believe in. Such films reinforce shared values and a shared identity. Makers of Alamo movies have tried in various ways and with varying degrees of success to address this vast, amorphous national audience. Indeed, the Alamo’s epic proportions appealed to Hollywood even before there was a Hollywood. The first effort to film the drama of the old mission and its famous battle was The Immortal Alamo, shot on location in San Antonio in 1911. All that remains from that effort are still photographs. Four years later came the second effort, Martyrs of the Alamo. Directed by W. Christy Cabanne and influenced by D. W. Griffith, it projected the familiar narrative in quite broad strokes of racist rhetoric, and it reinforced white supremacy at the zenith of Jim Crow. It looked and felt a lot like The Birth of a Nation (1915) and in fact exploited the connection with a subtitle, The Birth of Texas. Re-released in the 1920s mission statement 243 under the title The Birth of Texas, the film sparked boycotts by Mexican Americans angry at its obvious racial stereotyping. None of the early Alamo films, however, enjoyed the popularity or impact of Griffith’s opus, the first successful film to dramatize history for mass audiences. Griffith’s epic thrilled viewers nationwide, and President Woodrow Wilson, who sponsored a screening of The Birth of a Nation in the White House, is reputed to have said, “This is history written in lightning.” From then on, many Americans preferred their history in the dark instead of on the page. Today, many seem not to care about American history in any form. Another silent-era Alamo film was the first to bring Davy Crockett front and center. Anthony Xydias’s production of With Davy Crockett at the Fall of the Alamo (1926) portrayed Crockett as a slaveholder. The Alamo continued to draw the attention of filmmakers in the succeeding decades. In Heroes of the Alamo (1937), also produced by Xydias, the story line focused on two unusual figures: Almaron and Susanna Dickinson, the only Anglo married couple at the Alamo. On the night before the final assault, the Dickinsons and other Alamo defenders sing a “darkie” version of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” (“She’s the sweetest rose of color/that Texas ever knew”). Probably few who saw the film were bothered, if they knew, that the song was anachronistic, that it had not been written until 1858. In the 1950s there were three Alamo movies. In The Man from the Alamo, Glenn Ford, wearing western cowboy garb, played Moses Rose as a hero. In the wildly popular Disney version, Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier (1955), Fess Parker enshrined the coonskin cap image in every child’s heart. In The Last Command (1956), filmed in Texas at Brackettville, Sterling Hayden gave a wooden-Indian portrayal of Jim Bowie. John Wayne’s paean to patriotism, The Alamo, released in 1960, became the landmark film by which to measure any future Alamo ventures. Although Wayne’s publicity machine cranked out story after story about how accurate and authentic the film was, moviegoers and critics had a field day spotting errors. The geography was undeniably a bit wobbly: In the film the Alamo is located alongside the Rio Grande instead of the San Antonio River and Goliad is said to be north of San Antonio instead of southeast. But surely Frank Thompson, the author of numerous works on Alamo films and popular culture, overstated the case when he claimed that “not a word, not a deed, not an image corresponds with historical reality in any way, shape or form.” However, according to Wayne, his version made plenty of sense. “I think it...

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