Texas chutzpah Kinky Friedman would be proud of
One of the TV movie networks has been showing the 1960 movie The Alamo, staring John Wayne as Davy Crockett (horrible casting, but hey- John Wayne!) quite a bit lately. I first saw it as a ten year old with my older cousin, Patsy, in the theater shortly after it was released, and complained to her that it ended with the bad guys winning- that there was no reference to the fact that the Battle of San Jacinto was coming. Of course, it would have ruined a wonderful and poigniant ending to a fabuluous movie. But hey- I was ten.
Since then I've come to appreciate what a truly fine movie it was (even though it was mostly fiction; as history it's atrocious). The haunting score by Dimitri Tiomkin is among the most beautiful I can recall. Here's the Main Title (borrowed by Quentin Tarantino for his 2009 Inglourious Basterds), and here's the closing music- the latter played as the only survivors (Capt. Dickinson's widow, their two small children, and a burro) filed through the ranks of Santa Anna's victorious army at the beginning of their long trek toward the Texan lines. It didn't leave a dry eye in the house.
(ADDENDUM: I recently came across the clip below on You Tube. It includes most of that final scene, although in place of the closing music it has superimposed on it another Tiomkin song from the film- Tennessee Babe, a tribute to three-year old "Lisa" Dickinson, shown filing through the Mexican lines with her mother, her brother and that burro.
Whatever music accompanies the final scene of the film, it's a tear-jerker, especially in light of "Lisa's" line at 0:26 of the above clip: "Where's Daddy?" Kind of a shame, though, that the clip doesn't include the dirty look Susannah Dickinson gives Santa Anna as they pass him.
"Lisa" was played in the film by John Wayne's own daughter, Aissa. The Dickinson girl's actual name was Angelina, and there was no son. In fact, Susannah and Angelina were accompanied on their trip by Ben, the cook for one of Santa Anna's officers, Colonel Juan Nepomuceno Almonte, and sometimes for Santa Anna himself. They were later joined by Travis's slave, Joe, who had escaped from Santa Anna.
Contrary to what is generally believed, there were in fact 42 survivors of the Alamo. Some were children. But Santa Anna seems to have taken a special liking to little Angelina, and offered to adopt her-an offer which Susannah refused. Ben seems to have been sent along to watch over the girl and her mother as they traveled toward Gonzales and the Texian lines. After they reached Gonzales, Santa Anna's sometime cook became the personal cook of General Sam Houston! More information on Susannah and Angelina Dickinson's guardians on the trip between the Alamo and Gonzales can be found here).
Some might argue whether or not those who died at the Alamo really "fought to give us freedom." Several of the heroes of the Alamo were slaveholders, and an insistance on the right to own slaves was at least a subtext to the rebellion. The thought of Texas entering the Union as a slave state (or several of them) surely was in the back of some of the rebel leaders' minds. And viewed from that perspective, the evolution of Texas from Mexican province to independent nation to American state might be seen as a form of gradual American imperialism. But what cannot be denied is that Santa Anna, in abrogating the Mexican Constitution and seizing power as a dictator, not only gave the Texans a plausible and palatable excuse for their revolt, but cast it in the light of a war of liberation for Tejanos (ethnic Mexicans living in Texas) and American settlers alike. And seven of the signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence were in fact Tejanos, rather than American immigrants. Furthermore, lest the point be missed, Santa Anna's banning of slavery was somewhat hypocritical; Mexico retained a form of legal serfdom virtually indistinguishable from slavery, and it wasn't abolished until the 1880's.
The two scenes below featuring Thornton as Crockett are cases in point. In the first, Santa Anna's band has been playing the Deguello ("Slit Throat")- a tune which means "no quarter." It was, in other words, a musical message that the enemy would not be allowed to surrender and that any survivors would be put to the sword. Crockett's (Thornton's) response is a piece of chutzpah for the ages:
How Crockett died is a matter of historical controversy. Mrs. Dickinson, Travis's slave, Joe, Santa Anna's sometime cook Ben- who had met Crockett when the latter was a member of Congress and Santa Anna was visiting Washington- and San Antonio Alcalde Ruiz all knew Crockett, and all reported seeing Crockett's body near the main gate of the mission. The 1960 film follows their lead in assuming that he died during the fighting, but takes liberties with the details:
But several members of Santa Anna's army claimed that Crockett was recognized in battle, physically overcome, captured, and then first tortured and then executed. The 2004 movie chose to accept that version of Crockett's death. Again, we have Thornton's cheeky and very courageous Crockett, exhibiting the same kind of chutzpah as he did in the scene with the violin:
And then, there's always the option the classic Disney TV version of Davy Crockett, starring Fess Parker, took. Here, the question of how Crockett died was simply begged; in fact, when I first saw it (I was a big Crockett fan, and had a genuine coon skin cap that was the envy of every other five year-old in the neighborhood) I completely missed the point that Crockett had died- although I thought it was really too bad about his fictional side-kick, Georgie Russell (Buddy Ebsen). My mother had to break the news to me! It should be said, however, that what it implies about the circumstances of Crockett's death more closely accord with the testimony of Mrs. Dickinson, Alcalde Ruiz, Ben the cook and Travis's slave, Joe, than either of the subsequent versions:
One of the points which the 2004 version got right which both the John Wayne and the Fess Parker versions got wrong was the fact that the final assault took place at night. By dawn, the battle was all but over.
Historians say that Lawrence Harvey pretty much nailed the character of Col. Travis in the 1960 version. In actual fact, however, Travis did not die killing Mexicans right and left with his sword after heroically casting away his scabbard, as the 1960 film has it; he was rather anticlimactically shot in the forehead while standing on the wall early in the final assault. And while Jim Bowie, played in the 1960 version by Richard Widmark, was indeed an invalid confined to the bed in which he died, he was not confined there by wounds, as was Widmark's Bowie. He was deathly ill with an infectious disease, perhaps typhus and perhaps pneumonia. The Mexicans who killed him unjustly believed at the time that he was a coward who was simply hiding in his bed.
I've been thinking a lot about the Alamo (both the battle and the movies) lately, and may well have more to say on the subject in the near future.
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