Film
According to Todish et al., "there can be little doubt that most Americans have probably formed many of their opinions on what occurred at the Alamo not from books, but from the various movies made about the battle." The first film version of the battle appeared in 1911, when Gaston Melies directed The Immortal Alamo, which has since been lost. Through the next four decades several other movies were released, variously focusing on Davy Crocket, Almeron Dickinson, and Louis Rose. The Alamo achieved prominence on television in 1955 with Walt Disney's Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier, which was largely based on myth. In the early 1950s John Wayne began developing a film based on the Battle of the Alamo. When he left his contract with Republic Pictures he was forced to leave behind a partial script. Republic Pictures had the script finished and developed into the 1955 movie The Last Command. Although the film had its historical inaccuracies, it was the most detailed of the films on the Texas Revolution. Wayne continued to develop an Alamo movie, resulting in the 1960 film The Alamo, starring Wayne as Davy Crockett. Although screenwriter James Edward Grant claimed to have done extensive historical research, according to Todish "there is not a single scene in The Alamo which corresponds to an historically verifiable incident", and historians J. Frank Dobie and Lon Tinkle demanded that their names be removed from the credits as historical advisors. The movie was banned in Mexico. The set built for the movie, Alamo Village, includes a replica of the Alamo Mission and the then-Mexican city of San Antonio and is still used as an active movie set.
As the 150th anniversary of the battle approached in the 1980s, several additional movies were made about the Alamo, including the made-for-television movie The Alamo: Thirteen Days to Glory, which Nofi regards as the most historically accurate of all Alamo films. The movie Todish calls "the best theatrical film ever made about the Alamo" was also filmed in the 1980s. Filmed in IMAX format using historical reenactors instead of professional actors, Alamo ... The Price of Freedom is shown only in San Antonio, with several viewings per day at a theater near the Alamo. It runs only 45 minutes but has "an attention to detail and intensity that are remarkable". In 2004 another film, also called The Alamo, was released. Described by CNN as possibly "the most character-driven of all the movies made on the subject", the movie starred Billy Bob Thornton as Crockett, Dennis Quaid as Sam Houston, and Jason Patric as Bowie. However, the film, with its revisionist viewpoint of the siege and the reasons for it, was one of the year's biggest box office failures. In Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Pee-wee Herman's stolen bike is said by a fortune teller to be in the basement of the Alamo, but during a tour of the structure he is told by the tour guide that the Alamo has no basement.
Read more about this topic: Legacy Of The Battle Of The Alamo
Famous quotes containing the word film:
“The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half- piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.”
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“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)