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By
NICK ZEGARAC
John Wayne's conviction was
so firmly steeped in his production of "The Alamo"
that he went out on his own to direct this
lumbering fictional account of the slaughter of
187 men at the Texas landmark after every major
studio in Hollywood turned him down. The resulting
film is a sprawling and unabashed flag waver that
quite simply fails to get the patriotic juices
flowing.
Wayne plays Davy Crockett as something of a
Disney-fied fun-loving frontiersman who's not
above a good brawl. Laurence Harvey needs less
starch in his britches as the rigid Col. William
Travis. Richard Widmark as Jim Bowie is left to
veer between Wayne and Harvey in a performance
that can only be described as unsympathetic.
Richard Boone, Chill Wills and (oh, you gotta be
kiddin' me) Frankie Avalon are in it too. Frankie
doesn't sing. No expense was spared in this
brick-by-brick recreation of the Alamo.
The laserdisc version contained the original
director's cut of "The Alamo." This DVD is the
standard theatrical version. There's no entrance,
exit or intermission music and the aspect ratio is
mis-framed at roughly 2:25:1. Colors are generally
rich and vibrant but during scenes taking place at
night they tend to become a muddy, grainy mess.
The scene in which Crockett is confronted by
Travis in the saloon is riddled with age-related
artifacts and a faded camera negative that looks
as though it were dragged by four wild horse
through the Texas deluge. The audio is 5.1 but
strident in spots and remarkable muffled in
others.
Extras include "The Making Of The Alamo"
featurette -- but it has been edited for DVD --
presumably because, like the film, it just was not
possible to digitally compress all that
information on one side of a DVD. So why didn't
MGM do a 2-disc or flipper disc for this film?!?!
Go figure.
Perhaps with the remake of "The Alamo" getting
ready to debut on DVD we'll see MGM go back to
their vaults and revisit this Western saga. |
