Well, someone must have really gotten carried away. Even though the 1960 and 2004 versions of The Alamo purport to depict the same historical event (the titular Battle of the Alamo), each bears precious little resemblance to the other. If I had to guess, though, I’d say that the newer film comes closer to the actual facts. The casting alone is fairly revelatory. It’s not so much that Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie must have been very hard to describe if they truly fell somewhere in between John Wayne and Billy Bob Thornton, and Richard Widmark and Jason Patric, respectively; it’s mostly that Thornton and Patric performed their characters, well, in character, while the Duke and Widmark were just playing themselves — as they were wont to do, especially Wayne (and which nobody else did better, if that makes sense).
Larger-than-life figures in their own right, Wayne and Widmark embodied the Crockett and Bowie of legend; in contrast, Thornton and Patrick worked toward demythifying their historical counterparts. Consider this: Wayne’s Crockett is of course seen with the famous coonskin cap, whereas Thornton’s Crockett claims that he only wears it “when it’s extra cold;” needless to say, the weather is never cold enough in the 2004 movie. Another little big detail is the character’s appellative. When asked if he’s “the famous David Crockett,” Wayne replies that “They named me Davy,” therefore aligning himself with the popular perception of Crockett; of Thornton-Crockett, on the other hand, it is said that “He prefers ‘David.’”
Indeed, in Thornton-Crockett’s assertion that he is not “an actor in a play” (although he does admit, “I only started wearing [the coonskin cap] because of that feller in that play they did about me”) it is possible to infer a criticism of just such portrayals as the one in Alamo ‘60, wherein Davy Crockett doesn’t actually “slide off a rainbow and jump the Mississippi in a single leap,” but is nonetheless the stuff of tall tales (Wikipedia, citing Alamo historian Timothy Todish, observes that “there is not a single scene in The Alamo which corresponds to a historically verifiable incident”). The same goes for Bowie, an alcoholic dying of “Consumption. Typhoid. Pneumonia. One or all” in one version of the story, and an ubermensch — a physical specimen second only to Crockett himself — in the other. No points for guessing which is which.
All of the above nothwithstanding, what really goes a long way toward deconstructing the historical-figure-as-an-action-movie-hero stereotype is the characters’ final fate in Alamo ‘04, where both Crockett and Bowie are given decidely un-heroic deaths (at least by Hollywood standards); the former executed as a prisoner of war, and the latter shot in his sickbed (which of course makes it his deathbed as well), where he spends the second half of the movie (additionally, a grim anecdote by Crockett explaining his dislike for “taters” drives the point home that these men did things that you wouldn’t hear about in “The Ballad of Davy Crockett”). Meanwhile, Wayne and Widmark are honourably killed in battle, as they’d be expected to.
Is Alamo ‘04, in a vaccum, historically faithful? Probably not (ironically, films based on ‘true events’ seldom are), but it is certainly more honest, if not downright more realistic, that Alamo ‘60; moreover, the 2004 movie wisely makes room for the immediate aftermath of the Battle of the Alamo — namely, the cat and mouse game between the victorious Mexican Army and the Texan troops led by Sam Houston (Dennis Quaid), in which General Santa Anna (Emilio Echevarría) thinks he’s the cat but is in for a rude awakening. Despite being 30 minutes longer, the 1960 film closes with the decimation of the besieged, which makes not only for a downer ending, but for a rather anticlimactic conclusion.
Make no mistake; the whole thing was a senseless waste of human life any way you slice it, but by providing a bigger-picture context, Alamo ‘04 furnishes a sense of closure, with the bad guys getting their comeuppance (it’s worth noting that even Mexicans consider Santa Anna to have been a disgrace and an embarrassment), and the good guys having their sacrifice rendered ultimately meaningful. Conversely, in Alamo ‘60 there’s no bigger picture other than the actual picture itself, which is all things considered a little too big for its own good.
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